


The Fortune Cookie

by cruisedirector, Dementordelta



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aurors, Bureaucracy, Chinese Food, Espionage, Eventual Happy Ending, Family Issues, Fortune Cookies, Gay Male Character, Good Draco Malfoy, M/M, Magic, Masturbation, Ministry of Magic, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Mystery, Not Epilogue Compliant, Orgasm, Post-Deathly Hallows, Potions, Quidditch Player Ginny Weasley, Restaurants, Reunions, Romance, Severus Snape Lives, Sex, Waiters & Waitresses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 12:03:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8371630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dementordelta/pseuds/Dementordelta
Summary: The more Harry visits his favorite Muggle Chinese restaurant, the stranger his fortunes become.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to torino10154 for beta! All remaining errors are ours!

"Are you sure you won't come to dinner?" Hermione asked Harry, her brow furrowing in concern exactly like her mother-in-law's. Though it should have warmed Harry's heart to see that Hermione worried about him, he felt rather the opposite. Hermione was fully a Weasley now, welcome in all their houses any time she felt like popping by, whereas none of the Weasleys but Ginny herself had completely forgiven Harry for breaking up with the one everyone had expected him to marry, not even Ron.

"I'm sure, but thanks for asking. I have some things I need to pick up on the way home." It wasn't entirely untrue. On nights like this, when Ron, George, and possibly Percy were all meeting for dinner, Harry preferred to stop by his favorite Muggle restaurant, The Fortune Cookie, for roast duck, crispy pork, and a few of the titular desserts with their sweet crunch and cryptic messages. They might have been just as preposterous as most of Professor Trelawney's predictions from Divination class, but at least they didn't stoop to the level of _The Daily Prophet_ 's astrology column, which just the previous week had informed Harry that if he didn't get engaged soon, a famous reporter would write a column speculating on his intimate deficiencies.

At least no one at The Fortune Cookie seemed to know or care who he was, though the servers did shake their heads when he asked for a knife and fork instead of chopsticks and for cold water instead of hot tea. The restaurant was rarely crowded, so whether he got takeaway or sat at one of the tables under pretty Chinese lamps, the food arrived quickly and he never had to perform a secret heating spell.

"I brought you extra," the waitress told him that night, smiling as she presented his cheque with three fortune cookies sitting alongside it on the tray in their wrappers. "Would you like to try an almond cookie? No charge."

"No thanks," Harry told her, summoning a tired smile. He thought about adding, _maybe next time_ , but she always remembered his special requests, like extra crispy noodles, so he didn't want to create a false impression of interest. "I like the fortunes."

"These are special," the waitress bragged. "Our fortunes are written by a genuine wizard."

"Great." Not that Harry believed her for a moment, considering that the fortunes in these cookies looked exactly like the cheap printed ones that Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had brought home for Dudley on the rare occasions when they'd eaten Chinese food, always bland lemon chicken and bland white rice. "I've eaten a bit too much, so I think I'll take these home with me." He paid for his dinner and left, ducking around the block to a small apothecary invisible to Muggles, from which he could Floo to Grimmauld Place.

He opened the first cookie while his tea was brewing and nearly dropped the little slip of paper on the floor when he saw what it said:

_If you'd stop sulking, hiding, and moping, you might actually manage to enjoy your life._

Harry turned the little slip of paper over to see if there was anything on the other side, but it was blank, and when he read it again it still had the same decidedly not-cheerful, not-helpful fortune instead of the vaguely cheerful ones he was used to seeing. "I'm not moping," he said out loud, giving the fortune a little shake. Instead of eating the cookie as he had planned, he broke open the second one and stared at it.

_You'd be happier if you hadn't eaten dinner alone tonight. Again._

"So what if I did?" Harry exclaimed out loud, not sure he wanted to touch the third cookie. Before he could decide, he took a bite of the just-opened cookie and crunched it. It tasted as the cookies always did, dry and just a bit sweet, though this one might have had a bit of a spice he didn't recognize in it. He put the two slips of paper together to see if they looked, well, magical, in some way, but they looked like dozens of other fortunes he'd gotten from this restaurant, indeed from every other restaurant that offered the satisfying prophetic cookies. He blew a puff of air into his fringe and pushed up his glasses studying the deceptively ordinary slips of paper. 

Then with a stroke of brilliance he got out his wand and aimed it at the fortunes. "Finite!" Nothing happened. The strips of paper didn't even vibrate ominously as if fighting off the counter spell. He tried a Revealing Spell as well, with a similar lack of result. "That was probably a dumb idea," he said, opening the last cookie. 

_You know what they say about people who talk to fortune cookies._

Harry sputtered. "I wasn't --" He rolled his eyes. "I mean I was talking to myself --" That didn't sound any better, so he said, "That's it, I'm not eating at The Fortune Cookie again." He waited to see if the fortune had anything to say about that, but the fortunes didn't change or fade or give any other indication of magical origins.

The next night, he didn't analyze his desire to go to The Fortune Cookie again; he just went. The fortunes had just been coincidences, not prophecies, he told himself. The cookies weren't trying to tell him anything. Sometimes a roast duck was just a roast duck. 

To demonstrate that he wasn't stuck in any rut, he ordered the Cantonese lobster and honey walnut chicken. The lobster was expensive, and the waitress nodded approvingly, bringing him some of the almond cookies before he'd quite finished eating. Harry left them sitting untouched beside the plate of unidentifiable orange veg with what might have been raisins or might have been something so spicy he'd have had to drink an entire pitcher of water to recover.

When she returned, the waitress gave him the same disappointed look Harry received when his fork was placed on the table, but she obligingly brought three fortune cookies again with the cheque. Resisting the urge to tear into them immediately, inspecting the wrappers for clues to their origins, he forced himself to remain calm. "You said a wizard wrote the fortunes?" he asked casually. "How do you know he's a real wizard?"

"Oh yes, sir, he is a real wizard," she gushed, her accent suggesting that English was not her first language. "But I cannot say more. He requires secrecy."

"Maybe that's so no one figures out that he's a fake," muttered Harry, pocketing the fortune cookies.

"He is a genuine wizard," she insisted. "My uncle owns this restaurant. He makes all decisions. He would not tell me that the man with the scar was a wizard if it were not true."

Harry pictured a wizened old man with a dramatic facial scar and an outlandish carnival staff. "I have a scar too," he told the waitress, pushing back his hair to show her. "Do you think I'm a wizard?"

Briefly the waitress gave Harry a withering look that reminded him of someone. "You may not believe, but these fortunes are true," she insisted.

Rather than waste any more time in small talk, Harry paid the cheque and left. He went directly home, pausing only for a moment when he entered the apothecary and a familiar scent reached his nostrils. It wasn't until he arrived at his own house that he realized it smelled a bit like Twilight Moonbeams, one of the love potions sold at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.

Despite his eagerness, he forced himself to wait until he had put away his work clothes and fed his owl before he opened the first fortune cookie.

_All work and no play makes every Tom, Dick, and Harry a dull boy._

"So you do know who I am!" shouted Harry. The cookie, and by extension, the fortune, did not respond. He'd had an idea during the day, when he was studiously not thinking about the mysterious fortunes, so he pulled out his wand. " _Revelio_!" 

He was certain that one would work, as it forced all non-magical objects to revert to their magical origins. Mr. Weasley swore by it. Harry just swore. He poked the cookie with the tip of his wand. Then he ate the cookie. As before, it held a subtle hint of spice that spread over his tongue.

He'd told himself that he wasn't going to open all three cookies again, but he couldn't resist the urge. There was some enchantment at work here and he was determined to discover why it was directed at him. Before he did so, he attempted the _Revelio_ spell on an unopened cookie to see if breaking it open was what released the magical fortune. Again, nothing happened, unless he counted the slight crinkling of the plastic wrap, but Harry decided that was just the motion of the wand waving back and forth. 

He'd had one more idea during the day not thinking of ideas to try on the cookies. He picked up one of the still-wrapped cookies and concentrated on one of the bland normal fortunes, thinking perhaps the paper inside itself was keyed to his magic and was simply reproducing his thoughts. "You will have a long and happy life," he thought, then cracked open the cookie. 

_Can you believe you're spending your night trying to figure out a fortune cookie?_ it said. 

"Fuck you," Harry told the cookie, bringing him some small satisfaction before he crunched it out of existence between his teeth. This, too, was satisfying, since the elusive spice -- nutmeg? cumin? -- tasted good. 

He decided to crumble the last cookie over vanilla ice cream, so instead of breaking it in two, he crumbled it into small bits. It was sort of like the difference between crushing sopophorous beans instead of slicing into them to release their juice for the Draught of Living Death, something Harry had learned from the Half-Blood Prince's textbook. Snape had thought Harry was rubbish at Potions, but wasn't this sort of an applied Potions concept?

"Maybe I'm not as bloody rubbish at this as you thought," Harry said, to the mysterious fortune writer and to Severus Snape, as he the crumbs fall over his ice cream, leaving the fortune in his hand. Uncurling his fingers, he read the slip of paper.

_You should watch your language. You aren't a schoolboy any longer._

All right, so that had been a failure. Harry ate his ice cream slowly, pressing the fortune against the bowl to see whether cold altered what was written on the paper, but it just got soggy in his hand. Dribbling tea on it didn't reveal any secret messages either, whether the tea was hot or cooled to room temperature. Harry tried using steam on it, but that just made the paper start to disintegrate. He picked up the second slip, the one taunting him about spending his night trying to figure out a fortune cookie, and tried putting it in the icebox overnight.

As for _All work and no play makes every Tom, Dick, and Harry a dull boy_ , Harry took it into the bedroom, locked the door out of habit as he always did, and had a slow and gratifying wank, spattering the paper -- and his hand, and the sheet -- as he shouted his release. Weirdly, what came out of his mouth at that moment was, "Yes, sir!" 

His fortunes, however, did not change.


	2. Chapter 2

Resolutely, Harry avoided getting take away Chinese the next night...though when confronted by the contents of his own pantry, which consisted of mostly peanut butter and the crusted-over bottom of a jar of jam, he nearly relented. Slathering peanut butter on a slice of mostly-fresh bread, he gathered his rationalizations to heart that he was somehow outsmarting the "genuine wizard" who seemed bent on tormenting him. He didn't need the aggravation, and he certainly didn't need the advice or the insinuations. Besides, peanut butter tasted just fine with just a scraping's worth of jam. 

He very nearly made it through the next night without stopping for a restaurant cooked meal, but he'd forgotten to get more jam and he'd used the last two pieces of bread the night before so he stopped by. It was bliss being led to his favorite table, and studying the menu was nearly an orgasmic experience. He even had plum wine with his dinner, and had nearly half his dinner to take home for the inevitable midnight hunger pangs. 

Harry had his mouth open to ask to not have the fortune cookies included, but he was so replete from a satisfying dinner that he acquiesced to the waitress's knowing smile. Maybe, he thought, the key to figuring out the fortunes lay in opening them in the restaurant. He'd received many unremarkable fortunes before the other night. Perhaps if he read them within the confines of the Muggle restaurant, they would return to ordinary advice about hard work being its own reward and brash youth not appreciating the wisdom of age.

_Indulging yourself isn't the same thing as enjoying your life._

"Hey!" Harry yelped. There were only a couple of other people in the restaurant, but they both turned to look at him. Blushing, he returned his gaze to the fortune, which had not changed. A furtive glance around the room did not reveal anyone surreptitiously waving a wand in his direction or fixing him with a stare that suggested a spell, but of course a wizard could have been hiding in the kitchen.

That did not explain, however, how the wizard who wrote the fortunes knew what Harry had done in the privacy of his home. Maybe the wizard was guessing -- or maybe he just meant eating Chinese food every night -- but it was still awfully intrusive. Harry glared at the fortune in his hand as if it might at that moment be in communication with his mystery tormentor.

"If this keeps up, I won't come back to this restaurant," he threatened in a voice only slightly above a whisper. Then he tore into the second fortune cookie.

_Don't lie to me. You're too arrogant to give up on a problem you think you can solve._

Once again, Harry was reminded of Snape, except Snape would never have said anything that sounded almost complimentary to him.

There were only the pair of fortunes after his dinner that night, and he left feeling suspicious and unsatisfied, but he knew what he had to do. He used the Floo to call Hermione early the next morning. They met for coffee at a Muggle place, and to Harry's surprise, Ron came along, looking a bit sheepish but glad to see him. Being men, neither referred to the fact that they hadn't spoken for nearly six months. Hermione looked at them both, then rolled her eyes and sent Ron after their coffees.

"What did you want to see me about?" she asked, finding them a corner in the busy coffee shop.

"Why can't I just want to have coffee with you sometimes?" Harry said, climbing onto the stool. 

Hermione just looked at him and he almost started babbling about magical fortune cookies, but that suddenly wasn't a subject he knew how to broach without one of the fortunes in hand, and why hadn't he thought to bring a few of them along? Then Ron came back with their coffees and the conversation started awkwardly, but soon picked up when Hermione pointedly mentioned that Ginny was dating Neville and that they'd gone to some Quidditch match in Spain and were having a bit of a holiday for a few days. 

"So I've been having a bit of a laugh," Harry put in, trying to sound nonchalant, "I found this great takeaway place that gives out wizarding fortune cookies." 

"What kind of fortune cookies?" Ron asked, looking genuinely curious.

Harry gestured with his coffee container, waving it about airly. "You know, the sort that someone has written just for you, only of course, how could they, so they must be magical and tuned into your, I don't know, magical aura or something." He finished weakly. "You know, that sort."

"That's daft, mate," Ron decreed, looking at Harry askew. 

"Wizarding fortune cookies aren't a thing," Hermione confirmed. 

Somehow Harry had known that. 

But the last cookie had been right, even if it had been rude about it. He wasn't going to give up on the problem because it was intriguing and seemingly directed just at him, though not in a focused dark-wizard-trying-to-kill-him way, which was refreshing, and not in a madly-in-love-with-him way, which was also, given his status in the magical community, refreshing.

He knew where he had to begin. Even though the restaurant didn't properly open until lunchtime, Harry went around the back to the delivery entrance, hoping no live or recently-killed animals would be visible coming off the lorries.

Apparently he had arrived between major deliveries, because he saw neither headless chickens nor buckets of noisy crustaceans, just a couple of corrugated boxes that appeared to contain packages of rice and cans of red bean paste. A few surreptitious spells revealed no fortune cookies hidden in any of them. He was about to perform a charm to detect magical tampering when his usual waitress came outside, along with an older man who pointed and seemed to be giving her instructions about what to do with the boxes. 

Harry did not risk performing the spell to translate the words. Perhaps, he thought as he hunched beneath his Invisibility Cloak, this was the uncle of whom the waitress had spoken -- the one who knew the alleged wizard with the scar. If so, this man might have the answers Harry sought. He was about to reveal himself when the older man called out, "Daiyu!" and made a gesture with his hand, causing the largest box to float off the ground into the waiting arms of the waitress, who carried it effortlessly inside.

So the restaurant was owned by a wizard! Had that man attended Mahoutokoro or some other magical school? Harry had the impression that many Asian wizards and witches were taught within their own families, especially in rural China, though his own education about how magic was practiced outside of Europe had been woefully scant even once he began Auror training. Which, Harry was forced to admit, was proving to be far less interesting -- far less concerned with training in blocking the Dark Arts, far more focused on bureaucratic minutiae about reporting minor magical malfeasance -- than he ever could have anticipated. 

Regardless, Harry felt vindicated to see proof that the fortune cookies were connected with an actual wizard. That meant it was far less likely he'd gone completely mad. Plus it meant that he now had an excuse to use Ministry resources to investigate the restaurant, though he knew he needed to be cautious or he might bring the place to the attention of someone who would cause the mysterious fortune writer to go deeper into hiding. 

He decided that his first line of investigation should be about the restaurant itself, which involved research using Muggle resources. He discovered that the lease was in the name of one Chen Li, which, Harry quickly discovered, was common enough that there might have been a dozen people with the same name in London. However, he also discovered that although daiyu might refer to a kind of jade, it was also a woman's name, and that the cheques for the utility bills for the restaurant were signed by one Daiyu Li, whom, Harry surmised, might be the owner's niece and thus his waitress.

After a quick scan of Ministry records revealed no indication that the Muggle Liaison Office knew about a wizard running The Fortune Cookie, Harry decided that it was safe to return there for dinner. Even if Chen Li had recognized his regular patron as The Boy Who Lived, Harry guessed that the man had his own reasons for hiding his identity which the Li family wouldn't wish to jeopardize just to advertise the fact that Harry Potter occasionally ate their roast duck. And now Harry might have enough leverage to find out who was behind the fortune cookies.

"What's your name?" he asked the waitress when she arrived to take his order.

"My name is Diane," she replied, ducking her head with a small smile.

"That doesn't sound like a Chinese name." Then, fearing that the reply had been rude, he added, "My name's Harry."

"In French, Diane is goddess of the moon," the waitress replied. "And a hunter, like you." 

"I'm not a hunter..." began Harry.

"But you are right. Diane is not a Chinese name. My family calls me Daiyu."

So he _had_ found the right family. Smiling, trying not to look overly eager -- especially since she had just called him a hunter -- Harry said, "I wanted to ask you about those cookies. The ones you said were made by a wizard."

Her expression shifted, taking on an almost Malfoy-esque smugness. "Very powerful magic, I told you," she said, nodding at her own bit of wisdom. "You are having good fortunes?" 

"Well, yes, but I wanted to ask you about them --"

She looked up as the bell over the temple-style door jingled and she went to the front to check out a take-away order, then she disappeared while the busboy brought his tea. She returned again once he'd filled his cup with the fragrant brew "The usual tonight?" she asked.

Harry hadn't needed the menu since he practically had it memorized. "If I could just ask you about those fortune cookies," he said, watching to see if she was deliberately trying to forestall his inquiries. When she looked politely blank, he pressed on. "They don't taste like the usual ones I've had. Are they made here, in the shop?"

Daiyu nodded. "From my uncle's secret family recipe," she confirmed. Then her eyes twinkled as she added, "And the fortunes are inserted by magic."

"But the fortunes themselves," he began, "who writes them? And how do they --" He trod very carefully because he didn't want to come across as a lunatic. "Come true?"

"Magic is very mysterious," she said with a laugh, obviously not taking his inquiries seriously. Or perhaps she was used to deflecting customers from delving too deeply into the secret of the cookies. She headed back to the kitchen while Harry processed the fact that she hadn't actually answered any of his questions. 

He ate his meal with all his customary delight, since the food there really was good. The cookies, too, with their elusive hint of spice, even without the fortunes, were just enough sweetness to satisfy without overwhelming the dinner. Daiyu delivered three more with his cheque, pushing one toward him as she set the tiny tray down. "Perhaps this one will give you the wisdom you seek." 

Though he would have preferred to read the fortunes in private, Harry decided that to be polite, he should open the one she had indicated. Carefully, he broke the cookie in two and pulled out the slip of paper inside.

_She's in love with someone else._

"I'm not trying to --" yelped Harry before he remembered that the fortune cookie writer couldn't actually hear him. Or maybe he could -- for some reason Harry was certain the writer was a he -- but since whoever it was seemed to be able to read his mind, it wasn't as if he needed to make a fool of himself by speaking aloud. He felt his cheeks grow warm as Daiyu cocked her head, staring at him. "Sorry. Your fortune cookie seems to think I might be interested in dating someone when I'm not."

"You come in here alone. You have no girlfriend?" she asked him, then nodded a bit when he hesitated. "Or boyfriend?"

"There's nobody," Harry replied quickly, eating the sweet cookie to have an excuse to look away.

"But there was someone, once," she guessed.

"I had a girlfriend for a while, but things didn't work out." To give his hands something to do, he unwrapped the second fortune cookie. "And I think I had a crush on someone who was dead before I figured it out." The corner of the cookie broke off in his hand. He put it on the table. "What about you? You have a boyfriend?"

Daiyu's friendly demeanor changed at once. She glanced around as if afraid someone might be listening. "My family is very strict."

"A secret boyfriend, then?" Harry whispered, leaning in as he put money on the little tray with his cheque. The cookie crumbled in his hand.

"I am too busy for men," she announced, reaching to take the tray, sliding the wrapped third fortune cookie to the table with her fingers. While she walked away, Harry brushed the crumbs from his fingers onto his napkin and unfolded the slip that remained in his palm.

_Get your own romantic life in order before sticking your nose into anyone else's._

It might have been easier to ignore the fortunes if Harry didn't increasingly hear them in his head as if they were in Snape's voice. With a sigh, he put the third cookie in his pocket.


	3. Chapter 3

Harry walked the rest of the way back to Grimmauld Place mulling over his complete lack of progress in finding out the origin of the mysterious fortunes. Instead he'd found out that there was intrigue behind the scenes at the restaurant and that he was willing to admit to himself that he'd had a crush on Severus Snape -- two things he wasn't sure he'd needed to know. Once he got inside, he broke open the third cookie.

 _Fortune favors the Chosen_ , it read. Harry's jaw dropped open. 

The next morning he acted on an idea that had come to him sometime in the middle of the night. He Floo-called Hermione, then popped into her office, mitigating the early hour by bringing the flavored coffee she liked. "I'm trying to find out what was in Snape's will. How would I find out?"

He'd waited until after she'd had a sip of the frothy coffee before making his inquiry. Even so, she squinted a glance at him that didn't bode well for being able to hide his motives from her. "Why on earth would you want to find that out?" Before he could answer, she gave her coffee a seriously longing look but pressed on. "Does this have anything to do with that crazy stuff the other morning?"

"Crazy stuff? Haha, what, um, crazy stuff?" He ran a hand through his hair, wishing he'd gotten himself one of the giant coffees, not because he liked them but because he wanted something, anything, to do with his hands while pinned beneath her laser stare. 

"Magical auras and wizard fortune cookies," she elaborated, "And now Snape's will." She had this trick of not saying anything, knowing the other person would rush to fill the silence, and Harry was not immune to it.

"So do you know how to find out what happened to Snape's stuff?" 

Hermione pursed her lips. Then she set down her coffee, pulled out her wand and tapped a thick book on her desk. It opened to an early page and she scanned it, using her wand tip to scroll down the page. "There's a Bureau of Magical Vital Statistics," she mused, tapping the book again. More pages flipped and this time she and Harry both peered in. "We should be able to access --" She frowned. "It says access is restricted."

Harry saw that, too, there was a very stern looking raven on the page with its wings folded, hiding all the text on the page. A scroll beneath it very clearly stated "Access Restricted." 

Hermione's frown was even sterner than the raven's. "I am a first level deputy Assistant Minister; you can't restrict my access." The raven cawed and spread the wings a bit more, hiding even the words in the corners of the pages. With a final glare at the guardian raven, she slammed the book shut. "We'll see about that." Opening the book to the contents page again, she scanned it with her finger this time. "Aha, there's a shortcut through the Interdepartmental Bureau of Deceased Wizards." Before Harry could ask if she was making that one up, she tapped the book and it flopped open to a page near the back. Again, Harry peeked over the edge. Thankfully there was no raven guarding this page. There was only a drawing of a little mouse that gave them one startled look and scurried into a hole in the spine. With a smug tap of her wand, Hermione said, "Severus Snape, deceased."

The page remained blank. Hermione cleared her throat and repeated the command. "What's it supposed to do?" Harry asked while the page remained unhelpfully blank. 

Blowing out a breath, Hermione sat back in her chair. "It's supposed to shortcut you directly to all the records pertaining to Professor Snape. Not that I have any idea why you need this information."

Making an impatient gesture, Harry said, "Believe me, it's important." He fell back into the opposite chair, giving one last look at the blank page in the book. The mouse had its snout poking out of the spine, clearly hoping they were nearly done. 

Hermione reached for her coffee again. "I'm sorry, Harry, you know how suspicious he was. He must have blocked access to any information even after his death." She studied him a moment. "You won't tell me why you want to know?"

Sighing, Harry got to his feet. "It was a crazy idea really." He mustered up a smile. "Thanks for trying to help, but I'll think of something else." And by the time he got to his own office, he had had another idea. He was going to try to get the fortunes themselves to tell him who wrote them. He got more excited with each step. All he had to do was think about what he wanted to know all day, and surely the fortunes would be more forthcoming tonight. 

To assist in this plan, he decided to keep himself focused on the task by doing research on it. Just because Hermione thought Divination was a woolly subject, that didn't mean centuries of Chinese fortune-tellers practicing _suan ming_ didn't know more than she did. But his heart sank when he read that fortune cookies weren't actually Chinese in origin. As near as anyone could tell, they were based on a Japanese temple tradition known as _omikuji_ , which involved threading small paper fortunes around the outside of a sesame cookie. There had been legal proceedings in America between competing restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco about who had invented the modern fortune cookie, but no one disputed that they were first produced commercially in California, not China.

All right, so maybe Hermione had been right that wizarding fortune cookies weren't a thing. So what? Someone was using magic to create the fortunes given to Harry. Who would even have thought to do such a thing, if wizards didn't usually eat fortune cookies in the first place?

"A Muggle!" Harry exclaimed. Along with newspaper horoscopes, fancy decks of Tarot cards, and festival booth palm readings, fortune cookies were a form of divination widely familiar to Muggles yet largely ignored by witches and wizards. If Aunt Petunia, who feared and shunned all forms of magic, had tolerated fortune cookies, it suggested how commonplace and innocuous they were considered. Obviously Harry was looking for a wizard who was very familiar with Muggle life, not just Muggle roast duck and crispy fish.

Though he usually kept to himself at The Fortune Cookie, he made a point this time of waiting until someone else approached the door and held it open as an excuse to begin a conversation. "This place has interesting fortunes in their cookies, don't you think?"

The middle-aged woman bustling gratefully through the door, juggling a briefcase and two shopping bags, paused to give him an odd look. "The last time I was here, mine told me that my youthful attitude would bring me new opportunities." That sounded like the sort of platitude Harry had always seen in fortune cookies from other restaurants. "And one time it told me that my keen mind was suited to a career working with numbers. I'm a translator -- I can't reconcile my own bank balance without my daughter's help."

Was it possible that only Harry was receiving personalized fortunes? Instead of stepping up to be seated immediately, he smiled at a young man waiting to pick up takeaway. "Do you get any good news in your fortune cookies here?"

The man's return smile was accompanied by a quick glance up and down Harry's body which made Harry blush. He hadn't thought that the question might sound like flirting. "One of them said that being kind would make me lucky in love," the man told him with a shrug. "Pretty standard stuff. I'm already lucky in love, though -- two years with the same bloke."

That did sound pretty standard, and Harry was relieved rather than sorry to learn that the man already had a boyfriend in case Harry had given the wrong impression about his own level of interest. "I got a really weird one last time," he said casually. "As if the fortune writer knew me." Just then Daiyu arrived, handing takeaway bags to the other man and gesturing for Harry to follow her to a table.

She chatted amiably as she led him to his table. "You come in every night. You're my best customer." Her smile was genuine as she held up the menu even though she must have known he would shake his head since he hardly ever used it. "And a good tipper too," she added with a laugh.

"I've got a good feeling about my fortune tonight," Harry told her. "Though I may have become a bit obsessive about those cookies."

Her nod was knowing. "True magic is very rare."

"So is true love," he said, thinking of their discussion the other evening. She gave a nervous glance around to either side but she nodded.

"And worth pursuing," she added before heading to the kitchen to put in his order. 

Harry used the time waiting for food to focus on the question he'd been mulling over in his mind all day. _Who is writing the fortunes to me,_ he thought, _and why?_ He might have been thinking too hard because the young waiter who brought his tea startled him as though he'd been standing by Harry's table before being noticed. As usual, the dinner was superb, though Harry was so focused on the upcoming fortunes that he couldn't finish it and asked for take-away containers for the leftovers. 

"I put the fortune cookies in one of the little containers," Daiyu told him, handing him the bag. It was all Harry could do to wait until he was home to break into it, though again he focused on his question: _Who is writing the fortunes to me, and why?_

Forcing himself to put his leftovers away in the fridge, Harry found the small white cardboard container that rustled with cookies. There were three inside and he picked up one, thinking about his question again before he broke it open.

 _You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?_ it read. Harry nearly dropped the paper, wand hand pressing to his side reflexively. 

"Who are you?" he said out loud, his voice a bit strange in the stone-floored kitchen of Sirius's old house. Nothing and no one answered his query, and his hand relaxed. 

This was ridiculous. He was trying too hard. Setting down the uneaten halves of the cookie, he removed another, took a deep breath to clear his head, and cracked it open. 

_You've been warned to stop sulking, hiding, and moping, yet here you are, eating alone again._

"I'm not eating anything right now," muttered Harry defensively. He thought someone had once told him that he had to eat the fortune cookie for the fortune inside it to come true, but nothing he'd found in his research about the origins of the cookies had backed that up and ordinary fortune cookies weren't magical anyway. Setting the pieces of the second cookie beside the first, he broke the third cookie and pulled the slip of paper free.

_You need to remember how to find satisfaction._

That didn't sound as Snape-like as the previous two fortunes, which Harry found disappointing. Scowling, he told the paper, "You're the one who told me that indulging myself wasn't the same thing as enjoying my life." Mentally he made a list of things that reliably made him happy. Flying, whether on a broom or a Hippogriff, and succeeding at a really difficult spell, and catching the Golden Snitch in a Quidditch match, except that wasn't really about just himself, it was about making his team happy...

Sighing, Harry bit into a piece of the cookie. What did the fortunes know, anyway? If he was in the mood to indulge himself -- and he was, now that he had Snape's voice in his head and he'd admitted to himself that, perverse as it seemed, Snape's voice got him going -- then he was going to have a bath and indulge himself.

And then he was going to get back to the problem of what had happened to Snape's will and the rest of his belongings. He'd checked at one point to find out what had happened to the house in Spinner's End where his mum had grown up, learning that it had been sold and that the entire street was slowly being gentrified now that mills and factories weren't the primary sources of the town's revenue. Out of curiosity he'd looked up Snape's family home as well, but it hadn't appeared in the Muggle records and Harry thought that perhaps it had been torn down. 

But perhaps, like Harry's own house, it was now Unplottable. Maybe Snape had handed down the house and all its belongings to someone Harry could find. He was going to have to contact Hermione again in the morning...after his bath. 

He headed upstairs to the bathroom with its vaulted ceiling and large old fashioned clawfoot tub. This one tended to wander about on those claws; one time it had even wedged up against the door and refused to budge until Harry had promised to take a bubble bath. Apparently his tub liked bubble baths. Tonight it was in the customary spot, though one end had sat down as though it was a dog doing a trick. It scrambled up onto all four claws when Harry reached for the bubble bath. He made sure the pipe was connected--it came off sometimes when the tub wandered about--then began filling it. 

He was eager, since he could still hear Snape's voice in his head, so he shucked out of his clothes and climbed in before the tub had finished filling up. The bubbles frothed around him as he leaned back, spreading his legs out, knees bent slightly. Several of the fortune messages swirled around in his brain while he teased himself. It was easier every time he opened a cookie to hear Snape's voice, berating him, instructing him, guiding him, oh yes, guiding him, that was good. He kept some special slippery potion on the shelf by the tub with his soap and sponge; he reached for it now and squeezed out a thick dollop. What was it Snape, er, the fortune had said, about finding satisfaction? He would show that cookie a thing or two. 

"All work and no play makes Harry a very dull boy," he said out loud as he spread the slippery lubricant up and down his cock, hearing very plainly, not his own voice at all, but the one from the fortunes, the one from his dreams, the one he missed, the one he wanted, oh fuck, how had that happened and why had it happened now when it was too late. Only it didn't feel too late -- it felt wonderful, because something magical was happening, only Harry didn't know what, but he would find out, somehow. He bucked into his hand, other hand gripping the edge of the tub, crying out, not, "Snape," but, "Severus!" as though he had any right to, but it felt good and he wasn't going to take it back, not when that had been the best orgasm he'd had in months.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning Harry woke up feeling energized and optimistic. But on his way to see Hermione, he strode purposefully straight into the two people he least wanted to see...well, not as much as he didn't want to see the Malfoys, but a chat with Minister Shacklebolt and Arthur Weasley was not high on his agenda, either. "Keeping busy, Harry," noted Mr. Weasley, who hadn't entirely forgiven him for breaking up with Ginny, even though, by Hermione's account, Ginny was perfectly happy without him. 

As for Shacklebolt, the Minister said, in a perfectly undemanding voice, "I'm told by the Auror Office that you've been busy with a project no one else knows anything about. I trust that you would inform me if you'd heard reports of trouble."

"No trouble at all, Minister," Harry said as cheerfully as he could. "Just, ah, making sure there won't be any in the future." Though Shacklebolt still looked perfectly incurious, which was to say suspicious, he nodded -- like the rest of the Aurors, he was willing to give Harry a lot of leeway as long as Harry didn't do anything strange enough to draw unwelcome attention from the bureaucrats or _The Daily Prophet_ \-- and he had already started to walk away when Harry whirled and called after him, "Minister, do you know what happened to Severus Snape's belongings?"

Shacklebolt and Weasley both turned back to look at him. "Are you looking for something that belonged to Snape?" asked the Minister.

"Er, nothing specific." Harry could feel his face warming. He hoped that neither man was skilled in Legilimency. "I just wondered, since his family once lived near my mum's..."

Weasley and Shacklebolt exchanged a glance. "I believe that Professor Snape had all his belongings transferred to his office at Hogwarts?" Mr. Weasley asked the Minister, who nodded.

"Professor McGonagall found nothing suspicious among them. Most of his things have remained there."

Harry hadn't been to Hogwarts since he'd given a lecture to Defense Against the Dark Arts students the spring before. Perhaps it was time for another visit, and tea with the Headmistress. "Thank you, Minister," he said, making sure to include Arthur Weasley in his smile of appreciation. "I'm just tying up some loose ends."

Which gave Harry another idea. Instead of going to pester Hermione with more questions that would only have aroused her curiosity further, he went to The Fortune Cookie. He knew it wouldn't be open yet, but this time he deliberately sought Daiyu's attention when he arrived at the service entrance. "Listen. I have to go out of town, but I was wondering whether I could buy some fortune cookies to take with me?" If there was a mysterious unidentified spell on the cookies, Harry knew of no one better to detect it than Minerva McGonagall.

"Today's batch has not arrived," she told him.

"Wouldn't there be some left from yesterday? I don't mind if they're a little stale." Because Daiyu looked cross, Harry pulled out his wallet. "I'll pay extra. I probably won't be back by evening, and I really want my daily fortune."

Daiyu was still frowning, but she said, "Wait here," walked back into the shop, and emerged a few minutes later holding a cardboard container which Harry presumed must contain cookies. "It is not only the cookies that may not be fresh. Magical fortunes go stale if left untried."

Harry was sure Hermione would say that made no sense, but he smiled, thanked Daiyu profusely, and took the container before she changed her mind. As he turned to go, he saw her uncle come out and say something sharply to her, but he was too far away to hear what it was.

He Apparated just outside of Hogsmeade and walked along the path from the village to the castle. He had the walk to himself. Villagers hardly had any need to visit the castle, and, since it was a school morning, all the students would be in classes. The winged boars at the gates recognized him and one even winked as they allowed him to pass. Harry's memory stirred up the evening he and Ron had been caught out by Professor Snape after the now-infamous flying car incident, since he'd met them near here -- as students, they'd needed an adult to get them through the charms that were the first line of defense on the gates.

There were wards on the doors as well, but Harry knocked. A house elf he didn't recognize let him in, then scurried off to let the headmistress know he was here. Harry knew the way to her office, having visited Professor Dumbledore so many times, but he took his time so that Professor McGonagall would have time to do whatever it was the professors did when unexpected visitors showed up. 

Apparently what they did was to post another house elf at the foot of the gargoyle that marked the entrance to the turning stairway. "Headmistress says to tell Harry Potter that the password is, "Staunch are the friends that greet you," the elf told him. That almost could have been a fortune cookie fortune. The elf waited as Harry repeated the password and got onto the revolving steps. 

Professor McGonagall was waiting for him at the entrance to her office. Harry knew it had been redecorated since the fall of Hogwarts; indeed, many things had been rebuilt or modified. "Hello, Harry," she greeted him, showing him into her office. They chatted for a bit, and the fact that she asked about nearly every one of their mutual acquaintances besides Ginny let him know she was more up on gossip than she let on. 

At last they got to the real reason he'd wanted to visit and he saw no reason not to ask outright. "Headmistress..." She no longer called him Mr. Potter, and had told him more than once to use her given name, but he still found it difficult. "I'm interested in what happened to Professor Snape's things -- his belongings and his home."

For some reason, he wasn't surprised to see that she merely looked thoughtful instead of being surprised herself. "I wondered if you would be."

Harry set down the teacup that she'd had waiting for him. "Why do you say that?" 

She swirled the tea in her own cup, giving only a cursory glance at the grounds. "Given everything we learned about Severus, he had a much closer connection to your family than any of us knew. The things we -- I -- thought he cared about turned out to be a cover for the things he really did care about."

Frowning, Harry said, "But you knew he and my mum were friends, you must have. You taught them both." 

She turned her face slightly as gazed out the window for a moment, then pressed her lips together. "You must remember that when they were friends, Severus was just another student to me, one who was quite a handful. I was more focused on keeping the Gryffindor boys from hexing him in the corridor and him from jinxing them in the loos." When she looked back, her smile was fond. "Tell me why you want to know what became of his things, and what you've brought me there." She nodded toward the little box of fortune cookies Harry had set beside his chair. 

"It's because -- well -- " Though he had had plenty of time to rehearse as he walked from the village to Hogwarts, he hadn't come up with any explanation that might not make him sound bonkers or at the very least besotted. Perhaps the cookies would explain for him. Reaching for the container, he unfolded the flaps and took out two cookies -- one for him and one for Professor McGonagall. "It's a Chinese restaurant fortune cookie from a place where I often have dinner. Tell me if the fortune seems odd to you."

With a bemused quirk of an eyebrow, the Headmistress broke open her cookie and slid out the small paper contained within it. "Surely you've been told that these fortunes are no more reliable than Muggle oracle stones or Tarot cards." She glanced down at the slip of paper and a small smile tugged at her lips. "'You deserve to reap the rewards of a life of hard work.' That's very kind, but doesn't seem particularly odd, though I've rarely eaten in Muggle restaurants. Do these fortune cookies usually contain a different sort of message?"

Frowning, Harry shook his head as he cracked open his own cookie and tugged out the slip. It read, _Stale cookies offer few words of wisdom._

"I don't believe this," he muttered. McGonagall's smile turned into an expression of concern. He showed her what was written on the paper. "This cookie should have had no way of knowing that it would be stale when it was eaten. I mean -- okay, cookies don't know anything, but the fortune shouldn't have known..." He could see from McGonagall's expression that he did indeed sound bonkers, and he hadn't even properly begun to explain what he was doing there. "I've been eating in this restaurant for weeks, and the fortunes seem to be tailored to me. The waitress says that a wizard writes them, but I think I'm the only one who gets such specific fortunes."

"But surely that's an issue for the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office."

"I'm not sure the restaurant is actually breaking any laws. It's not the only one I've seen catering to both Muggles and magical folk, and if I'm the only one getting magical fortunes..."

McGonagall had aimed her wand at the paper and was performing all the same spells Harry had originally tried, with the same lack of results. "Are you quite sure these are magical?" she asked. "Perhaps whoever served you only wanted you to believe that they were. It sounds to me like it may all be an elaborate joke."

"That might be true, but the fortunes I've been getting definitely sound like they come from someone who knows me." Here was the part where he was going to prove to her that he'd gone round the bend. "In fact, they remind me of Professor Snape, which is why I was wondering what had happened to his things."

Thankfully, the Headmistress didn't look as if she planned to call St. Mungo's to inquire after his mental health, at least not right away. But she still looked troubled. "I can assure you that no one is misusing any of Severus's belongings to torment you or anyone else," she told Harry. "His house in Spinner's End was put under a spell very like the one used to protect the ruins of your parents' home from vandals. No one could disturb it without drawing the attention of the Ministry. As for the things in his possession when he was Headmaster of Hogwarts, they remain here, quite safe."

"What about his portrait?" asked Harry, gesturing at the inquisitive faces on the walls.

McGonagall's mouth turned down. "Severus never sat for one, nor did he choose to impart his wisdom to a portrait so that it might be passed on. I often exchange ideas with Albus Dumbledore's portrait." She indicated the painting in question, where Harry's onetime Headmaster appeared to have dozed off with a book in his hands, though knowing Dumbledore he might have been wide awake and listening in. "Unfortunately, I can't do the same with Severus. I miss him."

"I do too," Harry agreed without meaning to utter it out loud, but once he had, he didn't mind. "I suppose you think that's odd, considering how he felt about me." He looked gloomily into his own teacup.

"Not at all. Severus was a truly memorable figure in a culture that prides itself on the eccentric and unordinary." Her sharp eyes peered at him. "Have you considered that you may be wrong about how he felt about you?"

Harry squirmed a bit in the chair. "Of course I know now that he was just protecting me -- that he had to make me hate him." He took a morose sip of the tea. "He just did a really good job at that."

"At both of them," McGonagall said and Harry looked up. He nodded and she set down her own cup. "I can't help but notice that you've come a long way to find out about these, excuse me, rather ordinary cookies." She fluttered the first fortune she'd broken free of its cookie. Then she stopped and looked at the paper and at the two halves of the cookie she'd put on her saucer. "Though perhaps…" While Harry watched, she took a bite of the cookie. It crumbled a bit but she finished it off. "Perhaps there is something magical in the batter, not the paper." 

That elusive spice. "A potion," Harry said, practically quivering in excitement. 

The Headmistress washed the dry cookie down with more tea. "Severus wasn't the only person who could make a potion, Harry," she cautioned. 

Chuckling, Harry said, "He'd the only one that could make one be sarcastic to me." But he couldn't help but notice that she wasn't smiling. 

"It can't be --" she began. 

"I know, but something's going on -- something directed at me -- and I have to find out what it is. If someone is using one of his potions to get to me, I want to know that too, and I want to know why." 

"It may not be someone with your best interests at heart," she said sharply. "Perhaps it's a prank. Are things still cordial between yourself and the owner of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes?"

It didn't surprise Harry that McGonagall was fully up to date on the gossip about himself and Ginny. "None of them are happy I didn't get engaged to their sister, but I don't think George would take a prank this far. If someone's trying to embarrass me, it could just as easily be Draco Malfoy."

"He has the Potions skills, but I cannot imagine Malfoy going to such lengths merely to upset you," she mused. "He, too, came to Hogwarts inquiring after Severus's belongings. It would seem that the Malfoys know they owe him, and you, a great deal."

It surprised Harry that Draco would have admitted such a thing to a Gryffindor, even if she was now Headmistress of Hogwarts. Maybe the Malfoys had switched sides in more than name only. "Was Draco just making sure Snape's things were safe, or was he trying to take them away?" he asked. "I tried to see Snape's will, but it's under restricted access at the Bureau of Magical Vital Statistics."

McGonagall had taken another bite of fortune cookie and was making a face as if concentrating, trying to figure out the source of the elusive flavor that Harry now suspected to be a potion. She swallowed, taking a sip of tea. "Do you suspect the Malfoys of wishing to use Severus's belongings for improper purposes? It may merely be Slytherin loyalty..."

"I was thinking that, apart from you, Snape was probably closer to the Malfoys than anyone else." Harry didn't know why he hadn't thought of this before. If anyone else knew what was in Snape's will, it was, unfortunately, probably a Malfoy. "He didn't tell anyone anything and he protected his secrets. The Interdepartmental Bureau of Deceased Wizards can't even access his records. Hermione tried, but the pages stayed blank."

This piece of information made McGonagall's eyebrows shoot up. "Are you saying that the Bureau has no record of Severus's death?"

"They might, but, you know, restricted access," replied Harry just as there was a knock at the door. 

"That will be Professor Slughorn," the Headmistress sighed. "If you wish to leave without being seen..."

Harry still had both halves of his fortune cookie sitting on the edge of his teacup. "Actually, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask Professor Slughorn whether he can tell what's been baked into this cookie," he demurred.

As expected, Slughorn gave him an effusive greeting, and also as expected, Slughorn was not one to decline either a sweet or the opportunity to show off his expertise. Sitting and preparing himself by straightening his tie, folding back his sleeves, stretching his fingers, and closing his eyes as though he were performing for an audience, the potions professor took a bite of fortune cookie.

"Hmmm," he said.

"Is it a truth serum?" asked Harry. 

"My boy, you know that Veritaserum is odorless and can't be tasted." Slughorn made some more faces.

"Something like Babbling Beverage, then?"

Slughorn shook his head. "This is more akin to a love potion. I taste rose and peppermint." 

Peppermint! That was the elusive flavor Harry hadn't been able to identify. A love potion would explain why he'd been kind of obsessive about the cookies, and why he'd been kind of, um, aroused thinking about the source. "But how would a love potion make a fortune cookie's fortune change?"

"Well, it isn't a true love potion. I can taste no pearl dust or moonstone. I suspect it's intended merely to create an impression, perhaps focused on a specific subject." For all his bluffness, Slughorn was not a fool. "Perhaps a very specific subject," he added, gazing at Harry. "I would be wary of the witch who made you these cookies." 

Harry and McGonagall exchanged a glance. "I got these in a restaurant, Professor," he confessed, "a Muggle restaurant."

Using the tip of his tongue, Slughorn tasted the outside of a small piece of the cookie. "Impossible. There's magic in every crumb of this." He studied the nondescript bit of the shell. "Even something familiar, but I can't place it." His impressive brows drew together as his voice lowered to a conspiratorial tone. "These cookies aren't --" He drew in a breath, " _evil_ , are they? Not dark magic?"

Harry's jaw opened and shut again. "Evil?" He looked at the chintz saucer with the fortune resting beside his cup. "They're sarcastic, not evil." He made a face. "At least I think."

Nodding, Slughorn said, "I can't say exactly what sort of potion this is, just that it's akin to a love potion. There are some properties I can't identify, that might explain the, er, sarcasticness, but that's probably a by-product of whomever made it. Potions are like charms, very dependent on the witch or wizard's own personal touches. Flair, if you will. Whatever this one does, it could be tied to one specific person by any competent potion maker."

"Be careful, Harry," McGonagall put in. "It may be that a witch or wizard is trying to win your affections to share your fame. Or, as you suspected, someone like Malfoy could be trying to embarrass you."

Harry had certainly not developed any warm feelings for Draco Malfoy in the months since the Battle of Hogwarts, but he was pretty sure Draco wouldn't go to such lengths to court a witch, let alone to annoy an enemy. "Malfoy didn't put this much work into trying to do what Voldemort wanted. I doubt he'd bother." Slughorn, who had never been impressed with the Malfoys -- a big point in his favor -- nodded agreement. "Thank you, Professors. You've given me some things to think about. I'll see you in a few months when I talk to the Defense Against the Dark Arts students again."


	5. Chapter 5

There was no help for it, Harry decided. He was going to have to talk to Draco Malfoy. First, however, he had another question for Hermione, based on the way McGonagall had reacted when Harry had told her that the Interdepartmental Bureau of Deceased Wizards had a blank page where there should have been a record of Snape's death. He sent her an owl:

_If there's no record of a wizard's death at the Bureau of Magical Vital Statistics, is it possible that the wizard didn't actually die?_

He was back at Grimmauld Place, changing into clothes more appropriate for Wiltshire than Scotland, when there was a knock at the door. He didn't need a charm to figure out who was on the other side.

"Harry," began Hermione, sounding flustered and looking as though she'd left the Ministry in a hurry. "You need to stop this. Those fortunes aren't from Snape."

"How do you know?" he asked her, checking to be certain he had Galleons as well as pounds in his pocket. "Did you find something?"

"No, because I haven't been spending all my time researching it as you have, but I don't need to. Harry, I was there, remember? I saw him die, the same as you did."

"This is Snape we're talking about," Harry said stubbornly. "The man who told us about the Draught of Living Death the very first day of class..."

"Harry! He bled to death right in front of us. If I'd thought there was any chance that he might be under a spell or a potion, don't you think I'd have summoned Healers right away? You would have too, even before he gave you those memories. He is not still alive."

Rationally, Harry knew that she must be right. But he also knew that something entirely irrational was going on. "Listen, Hermione," he said. "You're probably right. But whatever is going on, I have to figure it out. I know it's important, like when I knew I had to go to Godric's Hollow --"

"We could have been killed in Godric's Hollow!" she interrupted. "Even if you're right, even if this business with the fortune cookies goes deeper than I know, this isn't something you need to work out for yourself. It isn't dark magic. This is something best left to the Ministry, for your own good."

Harry was positive that if he told anyone else at the Ministry anything, nobody including himself would ever receive any sort of fortune from the restaurant that wasn't generic advice about working hard or putting family first. "All right," he said, avoiding her eyes. "I'll file a report with the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office as soon as I'm back."

"Back from where?" she asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.

"Auror business in the south," he said shortly. He was pretty sure Ron wasn't keeping close enough tabs on him to know exactly what he was working on these days, and he doubted that Hermione would ask Shacklebolt.

"Fine, but I think you should come to dinner with us tonight," she told him. "All that Muggle Chinese food isn't even good for Muggles."

Hermione was probably right about that, too, but Harry made yet another trip to The Fortune Cookie before Apparating outside the grounds of Malfoy Manor. He was curious whether Draco's fortune would be generic pablum or something along the lines of, _Tell Potter that as usual he's looking in the wrong place._

"I don't care what he told you," Harry heard a voice coming from the top of the staircase that he recognized from too many times in class chiming in with an answer before Hermione could speak. It was Draco Malfoy, followed hurriedly by the house elf who had let Harry into the manor -- at least Harry thought it was the same one, it wore the same sort of towel he'd seen before. "There isn't any way Harry Potter would step foot in..." Draco caught sight of Harry waiting in the entrance hallway where he'd been shown and his voice trailed off. "...my house." Draco pressed his lips together, stopping several steps from the bottom and they stared at each other. 

"I thought this was your father's house," Harry said, though that wasn't how he'd meant to begin. 

Draco made a dismissive gesture with four fingers that sent the house elf scurrying back up the steps as Draco came down the last few. "What are you doing here, Potter?" he asked, not unreasonably, giving a curious glance to the pint-sized takeaway container Harry was carrying though he didn't comment on it. "My parents aren't home just now, but Vinny said you wanted to see me."

"I do," Harry said, trying to get back on a non-combative footing. "Is there someplace we can talk?"

Draco assessed him again, not bothering to be subtle about it. "That depends, I suppose," he said at last.

Harry frowned, trying to remember that Draco had always been able to get under his skin and that right now, he needed some help from his former classmate, help he hadn't been able to get from anyone else. "Depends on what?"

Draco had on jeans and a polo shirt, just as Harry did, though Draco's single outfit had probably cost as much as all of Harry's other clothes put together. "Is _that_ dangerous?" he asked, nodding to the take away container. 

Lifting it, Harry shook it gently, not hard enough to crack any of the cookies, but enough to show that it was lightweight. "Dangerous? I don't think so, at least not to you."

Obviously intrigued, Draco nodded to a room off the entranceway, thankfully not one of the rooms Harry had been in when he'd been brought to this house by Snatchers hoping to be rewarded for capturing Undesirable Number One. It was not an elegant room, but Harry could tell it might once have been. There were lighter spots in the wallpaper where paintings might have hung and uneven spaces on the mantel where treasured knick-knacks might have rested. There were also, at least, a pair of sofas. Draco sprawled into one, gesturing for Harry to take the other one. 

"First off, why should I talk to you?" Draco said, crossing one ankle over his knee. 

Harry perched on the edge of the sofa, setting the container on the low table between them. "Well, I think you're curious about why I would set foot in your house or you wouldn't have even let me on the grounds." He had no doubt that not just anyone could have wandered in as far as Harry had without someone knowing he was coming. 

Amusement played at the corners of Draco's lips. "Fair enough." He made that negligent little gesture again and Harry had to grit his teeth from telling Draco not to treat him like one the elves. 

Taking a deep breath, Harry decided to go for the heart of what he wanted to know. "Do you know why access to Sna-- Professor Snape's will and death certificate is restricted?"

Whatever Draco had been expecting, it apparently wasn't this. "Is it?" He shrugged. "I don't work for the Ministry, Potter. Why don't you check with your fan club there?"

Harry forced himself to hold his temper. "I don't care why it's secret, I know he, the professor, was secretive and bloody paranoid, but a...situation has arisen that I need to find out about."

"My family took care of the...arrangements. Perhaps we didn't file the correct paperwork," Draco said. He was picking at one of the embroidered flowers on one of the sofa pillows and didn't look up to meet Harry's eyes. "Is this the Auror Office asking, or just you?"

"Just me," admitted Harry. That, at least, got Draco to meet his gaze. "I got what I thought might be a message from him."

"From Professor Snape?" Draco's brow furrowed. "Something he left from before the battle?"

"I don't think so. I can't be sure. I looked up the Ministry records about his will, but they were restricted."

Frowning, Draco went back to fiddling with the embroidery on the pillow. "You're hardly an old hand at the Ministry. You do realize that Snape's grave might attract vandals if its whereabouts were public."

"I do, but these weren't public records -- they were from the Ministry's interdepartmental bureaus, except nothing was there about Snape." From Draco's evasiveness, Harry had a feeling he'd come to the right place. "I know that Snape and your parents were friends. They both had their own reasons to be sorry they ever trusted Vol--" Draco pressed his lips together and held up a hand. "Um, You Know Who. Is Snape buried in your family vault or something?"

Draco snorted. "My father may have considered him a friend, but he wouldn't let a half-blood be interred for eternity with Malfoy ancestors. I doubt Professor Snape would have wanted that, anyway."

"Then where is he?"

Crossing his arms, Draco studied Harry. "You still haven't told me why I should tell you anything."

At that moment, as if by fortune, a house elf entered carrying a tea tray. It was a perfect excuse for Harry to open the little cardboard container with the cookies. "Have you ever had one of these?" he asked, offering them to Draco while the elf poured tea.

Draco looked defiant. "Course I have, but don't tell my parents if they come home. They don't approve of Muggle food -- they think it weakens a wizard's magic." That did sound like something Lucius Malfoy would believe. Harry wondered exactly how many of his parents' values were now questioned by Draco, who pulled a cookie from the container. "These aren't poisoned, are they?"

"Professor Slughorn had one and he didn't seem to think so," replied Harry, taking a cookie himself.

"Slughorn's an idiot." Once again Draco made the dismissive gesture. Recalling how little esteem Slughorn held for Draco or the rest of the Malfoys, one of the things Harry had liked best about Slughorn, he decided not to argue. Breaking his cookie in half, Draco took a bite without bothering to look at the little slip of paper that fell into his palm. "These aren't bad, though. Not poisoned. I taste...peppermint. And roses. You aren't planning to ask me for a date, are you, Potter? I know you're the bloody Chosen One and used to getting what you want, but I like women."

Harry felt his face warming. He hadn't stopped to think about the fact that Draco, a better-than-average Potions student, might draw the same conclusions about love potion ingredients as Slughorn. "If you think I'd ever date you, you're out of your --"

But Draco appeared not to have meant the question as more than his usual taunting, and was now distracted by the small scrap which was usually the first thing that caught anyone's attention from a fortune cookie. "Oh, I see. You're just here to lord it over me that your side won. This says, 'As you mature, you will make better choices about whom to trust.'" With a shake of his head, he took a sip of the tea.

"You got one!" Harry leaned over to peer at the fortune. 

"You gave it to me. You brought it here to be a prat!" Draco declared, setting his cup and saucer down with a rattle of china. 

Harry was reaching for the slip of paper but Draco snatched it back, and Harry looked up, outraged. "Don't be idiotic," Harry said, trying to set his own cup down more gently and reach for the fortune before Draco did something stupid with it, like put it in his mouth and swallow it, just to spite Harry. "I know I gave it to you," he said, "I told you I thought I was getting messages from Snape --"

"Professor Snape," Draco put in, practically growling at Harry. 

Exhaling, Harry gathered up his patience. "I've gotten several messages like that, only directed at me, personally, as though from _Professor_ Snape," he explained, emphasizing the teaching title for Draco's benefit.

Draco blinked. "You're getting messages from a fortune cookie?" His mouth was twitching. "And Granger lets you out on your own? Have to talk to someone in the Ministry about letting dangerous lunatics run around with cookies." Obviously amused by his attempt at humor, he leaned back against the sofa cushions and laughed. 

"Here, I'll show you," Harry said, pulling a second cookie out of the container. He broke it open and pulled the paper out, hoping he wasn't about to be humiliated further. _You're getting warmer,_ it said. Harry passed the slip of paper over. 

Repeating the fortune, Draco scoffed, "What does that even mean? That isn't proof of anything."

"I know it isn't, that's why I'm trying to find out what's going on. These are from a Muggle restaurant. For the past few weeks I've been getting messages that could only be from someone who knows me, someone who knows circumstances about my life, and that I can't help feeling are influenced by or are coming from bloody Professor Snape!"

The two young men stared at each other. "You're daft. Give me that other cookie." Wordlessly Harry handed it over and Draco stared at it a moment before breaking it open. "If this is a prank cooked up by you and your Gryffindor pals, I'm going to call the _Prophet_ and tell them you're handing out cookies with love potions in them." He pulled the paper out, paying attention this time. 

_Don't assume your former enemies can't become your allies._

Draco blinked. "Is that for you, or for me?"

Frowning, Harry considered the message. It was vague enough to have been a generic Muggle fortune cookie message, but it could have reminded Harry that Snape had always been looking out for him, and that Draco's mum had lied to Voldemort to hide the fact that Harry was still alive. Not to mention the fact that Draco --

"Could be for either of us," he said, pondering the message. "I think maybe it's both. That we're supposed to be allies."

"Or this could all be an elaborate prank by your friends the Weasleys," observed Draco, though he sounded less sure of himself than usual. "Even if these are messages from Professor Snape, why should you care? He took an Unbreakable Vow for me, not for you."

"So you owe him your arse," Harry shot back, surprised that the words wounded him. Snape had, after all, spent more than a decade lying to the Death Eaters to protect Harry. "Did you repay him in the literal sense?"

Draco made a face. "I told you, I only date women, plus he's my mother's age. You're the one who's obsessed with him." He shot Harry a calculating look which Harry met without flinching. "I suppose you owe him your arse too. And my fortune did tell me that as I got older, I'd make better choices about who to trust."

"Then we can be allies?" asked Harry.

"Possibly." Draco took half of the last cookie, taking a bite. "These aren't bad. But you still haven't told me why this is so important."

Trust, Harry knew, had to go both ways. "Snape was my mum's oldest friend," he began. "And I didn't realize until during the battle how many things he'd done for me. He died for me."

"Over a bloody wand." Draco looked stricken. "Which, if you're right, was actually mine to command, not his. The Dark Lord would have killed me without a second thought if he'd thought it was the key to controlling that damn wand."

"You didn't even know you were the master of that wand. It took me months to work it out. I guess Snape died for both of us." Harry took a deep breath. If he wanted Draco's help, he was going to have to tell him the rest. "And I'd repay him any way he'd let me."

"Thanks for giving me that mental image, Potter." Wrinkling his nose, Draco pushed his face into one palm. "If we're going work together, you have to promise never to tell me things like that again." He pulled his face out of his hand and peered up at Harry. "How did you even know he was a --" The alliance must have already kicked in, because he changed it to, "That he wasn't straight?" 

"I guess I didn't know, not for certain, until just now," Harry admitted. He'd seen some things during his ill-fated Legilimency lessons, he realized, that had made him suspicious, but those things could have been wishful thinking on Harry's part, even back then. 

Draco looked like he was considering something. He put his cup down on the table with exaggerated care and said, "I've known for a while now that some things at the end of the war were hushed up. When I ask for details about certain things, my father tells me just to be glad that we're alive and that our property wasn't confiscated, or that we weren't turned into newts." He made that face again where his nose scrunched up. "I'd make a horrible newt."

Personally Harry thought Draco made a better ferret than a human, but he kept that information to himself. He asked instead, "What sort of things did you ask about?" 

Nodding to the slips of paper on the table, Draco said, "For one thing, I asked about what happened to Professor Snape, whether I could visit his grave, where his original wand ended up." He frowned at Harry, who must have looked as skeptical at this remark as he felt. "What? He tried to protect all of us, while you were off --" He waved his hand vaguely toward the window. "I owed him some respect."

"So you tried to see his things at Hogwarts," Harry said, remembering what Headmistress McGonagall had told him. "Only you couldn't. Neither could I. His house is under magical protection too, did you know that? And," Harry continued, "there's no record of his death at the Ministry."

If Draco had still been sipping tea, he would have sputtered it out. "Who told you that?" Without waiting for an answer, he snapped his fingers. "Granger, of course you'd go to her, and she would know how to find out."

"Only she couldn't," Harry added as they stared at each other. 

Still thinking out loud, Draco asked, "Why would the professor want to disappear?" Then he shook his head, "That's not the right question is it?"

"He wanted to disappear for the same reason your family probably did."

"He would have made a terrible newt as well," put in Draco, nodding thoughtfully. "So the question really is, if he's alive, where is he and why does he want us, well, you, to know?" They both looked down at the discarded fortunes. "You'd better tell me everything you know about these fortunes and where they came from."

Harry filled him in on everything he could remember, from the first hints that the fortunes were aimed at him to the absolute certainty that certain fortunes were advising him, even if they did go about it in a sarcastic tone. They spent the next hour debating the best way to find out exactly what was going on at The Fortune Cookie. Daiyu, Harry felt certain, was the key. He had the impression that the waitress had a secret nearly as big as his own.

"I can't exactly go in there anonymously," Draco objected when Harry suggested that he do just that. "You may not like to admit it, Potter, but my family is quite famous."

"Among wizards, maybe," agreed Harry. "But not among Muggles, and pretty much everyone else who eats there is a Muggle. As for the owner, Mr. Li, the last thing he wants is to draw attention to the fact that he _is_ a wizard, so I don't think you have to worry about him pointing and shouting, 'Look, it's Draco Malfoy!'"

"Perhaps not in public, but he might try to circulate the information that I've eaten in his restaurant. He wouldn't be the first." Harry wondered whether Draco was deliberately being smug or whether he just couldn't help it. While Harry rolled his eyes, Draco continued, "Since they already know you, doesn't it make more sense for you to eat there while I sneak into the kitchen instead of the reverse?"

Harry supposed that that did make sense, but he wasn't about to tell Draco that he had an invisibility cloak. "I know the restaurant," he insisted. "I'll be able to get around without being able to attract attention. Besides, you're very good at getting people to listen to you -- you'll do a better job keeping the waitress distracted."

Looking pleased with this assessment, Draco nodded. "All right, Potter. But if this Muggle food gives me diarrhoea, I'm holding you responsible for cleaning the loo."

Harry was confident that Draco's stomach could handle whatever he ordered at The Fortune Cookie. "Try the roast duck and go easy on the clams," he advised. "Why don't we meet at the apothecary round the block from the restaurant at seven..."

Just then there was a commotion near the front door and Harry heard Lucius Malfoy's unmistakable authoritarian tone addressed to the house elves. "I should go --" he began, but it was too late. The elder Malfoys were striding past the room where Harry sat with Draco, and Narcissa Malfoy spotted him.

"Hello, Mr. Potter," she called, her voice betraying both surprise and unease. 

Her husband practically fell over as he came to a halt in the doorway. "You didn't tell me that you were expecting guests, Draco," Mr. Malfoy said with a hint of warning in his voice.

"Potter decided to surprise me," announced Draco with false cheer. "He was asking whether I knew what had happened to Professor Snape's belongings. Seems that the professor once confiscated a Zonko's bag that was of some sentimental value to Potter, and he wants it back."

"A gift from the Weasley girl, no doubt," said Draco's father, wrinkling his nose. "Her brother Percy told me that she refused to marry you."

Harry was about to object, but decided that if that was the story Percy was telling about why Harry and Ginny were no longer a couple, he might as well not contradict it. "Ginny's too successful a Quidditch player to want to get married right now anyway," he replied, which was probably true in any case. "And it wasn't a Zonko's bag, it was something that once belonged to my mum. Do you know where his things are, sir?"

Lucius Malfoy's face betrayed nothing, but Narcissa Malfoy darted a quick glance at him, then at Draco, and appeared to shake her head ever so slightly as her husband said, "I've heard your theory that Severus made all his choices because he loved your mother. I wonder, was this item a Muggle artefact?"

Again Draco's mum darted a glance at his dad, this time appearing irritated. "I'm afraid we don't know what's become of Severus's belongings, Mr. Potter." Narcissa Malfoy's tone was far more gracious than her husband's. "As you probably know, most of them were confiscated by the Ministry."

"Well, thanks for your help," Harry replied as unironically as he could manage. "And thanks for the tea, Draco. You should try some from the apothecary I was telling you about." He gave Draco a significant look.

Draco moved to show him out as Mr. Malfoy picked up the now-empty fortune cookie container. While Harry headed toward the door, he heard Draco's father say to his mother, "And now he's eating Muggle food. It's as if none of our history matters to him."

Barely containing his temper, Harry stepped outside. Engaging in arguing against Malfoy prejudices wouldn't get him anywhere and it might actually make it difficult for Draco to slip out to meet for their covert operation. As it was, he was glad to be getting away without being turned into a newt. Or worse.


	6. Chapter 6

At seven o'clock, Harry paced a bit in front of the apothecary shop before Draco strolled around the corner. He pointed out The Fortune Cookie as they approached it. 

"Did you have any trouble getting away?" Harry asked, stopping well ahead of spotting range. He himself had used the Invisibility Cloak to have a look around that afternoon to scope out the shortest, most accessible route into the kitchen.

"Dad grilled me about the real reason you were there," Draco said doing an eyeroll any Muggles who still lived with their parents would envy. "He seems to think you're going to open an investigation into war crimes."

Harry snorted. "Your dad is a paranoid bugger, isn't he?"

"It's kept us all alive," Draco pointed out. "Anyway, I stuck to the story and he backed off, but he sent several owls this afternoon that he was secretive about." At a look from Harry, he added, "All right, more secretive than normal." They had stopped about half a block away from the restaurant. "What's the plan for meeting after -- back to the apothecary?" 

Without admitting he hadn't really thought that far ahead, Harry nodded. "That's as good a place as any. I'm sure I'll be there before you, since I'm not having dinner here." They separated and Harry watched Draco go inside before hurrying off to the alley he'd investigated earlier. He put on the cloak and started moving in closer. Right away, he wished he'd had more than a chocolate bar all afternoon, because the cooking smells were making his stomach rumble. To quell his hunger before proceeding, he forced himself to take in several lungfuls of air near the large rubbish containers with their rotting, disgusting smells. 

As before, there were stacks of empty crates, boxes that had been flattened for recycling, and even several bicycles locked up behind the restaurant. The service entrance door was open, letting fresh air in as several cooks bustled around the steaming counters. Harry's destination was not the service entrance, however, but the second floor and the door he'd spotted that afternoon. He made sure his cloak was secure in place before doing a quick levitation spell to the grillwork landing that marked the bottom floor from the next. The metal made a groaning sound when he landed on it, and he had to make a grab for one of the supports because the landings -- as a deterrent, he supposed, to second-story burglars -- were spaced widely apart, and not solid as they had seemed from below. 

The door was actually more like a very tall window, covered in a dark silky covering against the glass. And it was plainly locked by a window bolt between the two halves. " _Alohomora,_ " he cast non-vocally in case his metallic landing had been detected over the din of cooking below. His main fear was that the premises were protected by magic and that the unlocking spell wouldn't work, but the bolt slid open with the softest of clicks and Harry pushed the bottom open and slipped inside. 

He'd been afraid that this was a flat for the owner or some of the staff, though he knew Daiyu at least left work each night with a hat and jacket on. But as he looked around, he realized that it was clearly an office, and a neatly organized one at that. There was, too, a subtle scent that he could make out above the cooking smells, some whiff of memory, some scent he knew if he could only remember from where. He stopped and took several breaths of it, wondering briefly how Draco was doing below. He listened too, for the sounds of anyone prowling around up here, anyone besides himself of course, but the place felt empty and silent. 

Going through papers in the office was like searching for a needle in a haystack, so he decided to look around the rest of the upstairs, for this tiny room didn't cover nearly enough space to be all that was up here. Cautiously he moved to the door and opened it, keeping the cloak around himself as he peered into the next room. 

Harry half expected another office, and even a bedroom or other habitable room wouldn't have surprised him. What he found instead was a room with counters all around three walls and one sturdy one in the middle. On top of all the counters stood laboratory equipment. Beakers and flasks, mortars and pestles. And about twelve sizes of cauldrons. The elusive scent snapped into place. This place smelled like the Potions classroom of Hogwarts, and this room looked like someone had been making potions. Recently. 

It also reminded him of the apothecary around the corner, the one that had smelled briefly of Twilight Moonbeams.

Though he was aware of the need to keep his visit brief, Harry inspected every piece of equipment in that laboratory. As excited as he was to have found the room, his heart began to sink as he inspected the containers and beakers. Other than being a potions laboratory, the room didn't much remind him of Snape -- that is, of the dungeon at Hogwarts. Apart from a propensity for collecting ingredients valuable in love potions and keeping food fresh, the owner had left no clues about his identity. Though Harry tried various charms, he failed to uncover any secret hiding place that disguised Snape's -- that is, some particular wizard's -- personal belongings behind a wall or within an invisible cabinet. 

There were spells that worked much like Muggle fingerprints used by Aurors to track dangerous witches and wizards, but it was illegal to track a wizard who hadn't committed a crime, and anyway the spell had to be activated in the presence of the wizard before it could be used to figure out where that wizard had been. So Harry had no way of figuring out who had been using the laboratory. It wasn't as if he could expect to find strands of long, dark hair on the floor. He did find fortune cookies -- dozens of them -- but as he cracked open one after another, he read a series of bland, generic pieces of advice. _Your school years were the start, not the end, of your education. Your strongest sense is your sense of humor. Try to enjoy the journey as much as the destination._

He'd been in the room for nearly an hour and was about to sneak out the way he'd come in when the door opened. Though Harry had remained under his cloak, he ducked quickly beneath a table, seeing only legs at first, apparently belonging to a woman in a long skirt and a slightly stocky man. They were speaking in Chinese. Quickly Harry cast a spell that would allow him to understand them.

"...famous wizarding family," said the woman's voice. It sounded like Daiyu, though Harry didn't chance a peek to see whether he was right.

"That boy is a spy." That was probably Mr. Li, the owner. "Give him an ordinary fortune and send him on his way."

"He liked the food. He was very complimentary. If he praises us to others, it would bring in more money. You could hire another waitress. We would not need to --"

"We do not need the sort of trouble he would bring!" Mr. Li hissed. "We do not want to draw attention to ourselves. Neither does our friend. He intended those special fortunes for the Chosen One only."

While Harry hoped that his own gasp of surprise had not been overheard, Daiyu coughed delicately. "Perhaps if we had a wealthy patron..."

"Enough!" Mr. Li marched past the table where Harry was hiding. "Do you think I do not know your plans? You think that if I hire another waitress, you can spend more time with that young man of yours. That will not do! He is not one of us!"

"Uncle --"

"No more!" A rattling sound made Harry's stomach clench. He'd put the broken fortune cookies into the rubbish bin but he hadn't made the contents disappear. "Look, these have all been broken. Perhaps our friend is out of ideas for clever fortunes. Soon he will move on, and all will be as it was."

There was a moment of silence. Harry imagined Daiyu nodding and looking down. Even though Harry knew no one could spot him under the cloak, sounds and scents could betray him, and some magical folk seemed to sense when he was near. Fortunately, Mr. Li and Daiyu gathered up something from one of the counters and left. Harry waited until he was certain two sets of feet had descended the stairs before sliding out from beneath the table. 

He knew he'd been right: the fortunes had been aimed at him. He was more determined than ever to find out who was behind them. Retracing his steps, he took off the cloak by the dark window, and -- taking no chances of being spotted, even though the sound would be recognizable if anyone heard it -- Apparated to the front of the apothecary to see how Draco had fared. 

Draco was waiting for him, one hand in the pocket of his trousers. When he caught sight of Harry, he pulled out the fortune. "It's rubbish." He thrust it toward Harry, who read it. 

_A happy spouse makes a happy home._

Harry snorted. "They must have come upstairs to get this one especially for you. They wanted you to get a boring one." 

Draco narrowed his eyes. "That bird looked a little brittle when she came back with it. We were getting along fine until then." His mouth took on a smirk. "I'm certain she recognized me." 

"That doesn't change the fact that there's an entire potions laboratory upstairs." Harry said, which got a satisfyingly startled look from Draco. Harry related what he'd learned.

"So there's a mysterious ‘he' involved," Draco said, "And you think it's the Professor, even though all accounts said that Professor Snape died during the battle."

Something about the way he said that made Harry think. "All the accounts were from Ron, Hermione and me. There weren't any other witnesses," he mused aloud. "You said your family made the arrangements concerning Snape, but what exactly does that mean?"

Pursing his lips, Draco said, "My father told me everything had been taken care of. I assumed that meant --" He waved the hand with the fortune still in it. "A grave." They looked at each other until Draco added, "No. No chance. I'm not interrogating my father!"

"Oh come on, Malfoy, you could make truth serum in your sleep!" Harry countered, but no matter how much they argued, Draco was adamant about leaving his family out of their investigation. The best that he could get was an agreement that Draco would at least ask about seeing where Snape was buried and see what his father said, which wasn't satisfying for either of them, but Harry couldn't think of anything better that didn't involve an Unforgivable Curse. The worst thing was that once he got home, he realized he'd never had any dinner, and the Fortune Cookie was by then closed for the evening. He made himself a cheese sandwich and tried to think what to do next. 

He had some ideas. He could stake out the potions room over the restaurant, but he might waste days watching Mr. Li concoct soy sauce. He could bother Hermione again for access to Snape's old house, but he knew she would insist on going through proper channels and that would take weeks or even months. He could get his own truth serum and kidnap Lucius Malfoy, but the idea of that made Harry uneasy and almost certainly guaranteed that Draco wouldn't help him any more. 

He did have one idea that he couldn't find fault with, and that was to shadow Daiyu Li. He had no idea where she lived, whether she lived with her uncle or alone, though he suspected the latter because he'd seen her leaving after her shift and she was usually walking alone. Maybe, though, after what he had heard about her having a boyfriend of whom her uncle did not approve, it made sense to try to talk to her first.

Harry resolved to do just that, to return to The Fortune Cookie first thing in the morning, and went to bed content...especially after a very satisfying wank during which he imagined Snape in the laboratory Harry had discovered, flavoring Harry's special cookies by making himself come in the batter while shouting Harry's name. With that pleasant image lingering in memory, Harry walked out his front door with a spring in his step...only to find that, just outside the door, someone had left a small container.

A fortune cookie container.

Harry practically bounced with glee. His house was still Unplottable to keep gawkers and gossip columnists away, so only someone who'd been given permission could find it...and while that list did not include Daiyu, Mr. Lee, or even Draco and his parents, it did include Severus Snape. Opening the box, he broke open the first of the two fortune cookies inside. 

_People who don't go to work put their careers at risk._

"Bloody hell," Harry groaned aloud. Of course Snape -- er, the fortune writer -- was right. He hadn't even given a thought to telling the Auror Office that he was going to be late again. 

Obviously he was going to need to go to the Ministry of Magic before he went back to The Fortune Cookie. And maybe that was a good thing. Maybe he could ask Hermione to check into something Harry himself might have overlooked. Maybe there was an important clue he'd miss if he didn't pay some attention to his real job.


	7. Chapter 7

Unfortunately, when Harry arrived at the Auror Office, things were in a bit of an uproar. As Harry discovered before he'd even reached the office, half the Aurors had gone out to check on a report of an incident at what had once been the summer home of the Lestranges, to find only minor vandalism and rude words painted on walls, with no sign of any dark magic. The other half were gathered in a corner, gossiping, as Harry arrived. 

"What's going on?" he asked Ron.

"Lucius Malfoy went sweeping into the Minister's office this morning demanding to speak to Shacklebolt immediately," Ron told him. "Made him cancel a meeting."

"Isn't that just the typical Malfoy sense that he should get whatever he wants taken care of the moment he wants it?" Harry tried not to look nervous, though he was worried. What if Draco had aroused his father's suspicions, asking too many questions about Snape? Were the Malfoys and the Ministry working together on any plan to keep Snape's whereabouts a secret, or was one of them hiding something from the other? If Snape was alive, what if Harry's actions had only served to drive him further into hiding? 

"Whatever it is, he was even more of an arrogant bastard than usual," muttered Ron. "Anyway, where have you been? Even the Minister has been asking whether we know what you're up to. Hermione won't tell me but I can tell she thinks you might have gone a little bonkers. Will you at least take a look at the Lestrange report to see whether our esteemed elders missed something?"

With a sigh, Harry sat down at his desk. His plan to find Daiyu was obviously going to have to wait. As he picked up a file, something occurred to him. He opened the container with the remaining fortune cookie and opened it.

_Secretaries and Ministers know more than you do._

Harry gasped, then looked around quickly, but Ron was only nodding over his own report folder. "Riveting stuff, I know," said Ron, biting into a pink-drizzled doughnut and not looking up. 

"I, er, just remembered something," Harry said, picking up the fortune and getting to his feet, "Something I, um, forgot earlier." Ron looked up and just shook his head as Harry sidled past him and out into the corridor. He headed for the Ministry owlery at a run. When he got there, he picked out one of the staff owls and wrote on the back of the tiny slip of paper from inside his cookie. 

_If you didn't want me to find you, you shouldn't have made me want to._

"Severus Snape," he told the bird. It was probably his imagination that the bird gave a beak nod of determination, but it took off out the open window. On his way back to his office, he wondered about the Lestrange incident, but decided it probably didn't amount to anything. It was the Minister's meeting with Lucius Malfoy that had him more concerned. 

When he got back to his desk, there was an owl waiting at it. For a moment Harry thought it was the one he had just sent off in search of Snape, but he realized that the coloring was slightly different. The owl stuck out its leg when he approached it. 

"Let me have a piece of that doughnut," Harry asked Ron, breaking off a bit and offering it to the owl before he untied the message. The owl flew off with the frosted bit in its beak and Harry sat down at his desk, unscrolling the parchment. 

_My father got a mysterious Fire call in the middle of the night and went berserk. Think he may be headed to the Ministry. Keep your head low._

Well, Harry couldn't fault Draco for trying. He wished he'd had the foresight to owl him this morning as well and have him try to shadow Daiyu. Folding the message back up, he decided to go see the Minister himself. 

He got past Shacklebolt's secretary on the strength of being The Chosen One, but the young man looked nervous when Harry started for the closed door. "No, wait, he's in a meeting," the man tried, but Harry pushed open the door. Lucius Malfoy looked up, barely containing his anger at the intrusion. Harry looked between the elder Malfoy and Minister Shacklebolt, trying to determine whether anyone was about to hex him before he shut the door. 

Harry had only one card in his hand, so he played it. "I know Severus Snape is alive," he announced.

"Poppycock!" Malfoy said, fingers tightening on the snake head of his walking stick. "Utter poppycock! You and your friends were the very ones who reported his death in the first place."

"Why do you say otherwise now, Potter?" Shacklebolt asked, folding his own hands in front of him. At least no one had reached for his wand, so Harry stepped further into the room.

"I just do," he said, "And to prove it, I sent him an owl. The owls won't deliver messages once someone has died, they won't even try. They just know somehow. This owl took right off." 

"He's never had any consideration for the danger he's put us all in," Malfoy said, "And now he's involved my son. I won't have it. I've done everything you've asked." Cold blue eyes swept over Harry then back to the Minister. 

Frowning, Harry looked at Shacklebolt too. "Everything you've asked?" he repeated, letting the implication sink in. "Why didn't anyone think to tell me?" he demanded, trying to sound calm.

"Tell you? Do you think the wizarding world still revolves around you, Mr. Potter?" Malfoy said, his lips still pressed thinner than Harry would have believed human lips could go. "I assure you that it does not. While you and your friends go about making our world safe from spray-painted words, there are those of us who feel less easy with the sudden changes of heart some of your former enemies professed."

Outraged, Harry stalked a few steps closer. "Like you, Mr. Malfoy?" The Minister was gesturing for Harry to sit down, but all that he'd been through the past few days was catching up to Harry and he waved him off. "I saw Snape die," he ground out. 

"I saw many people die," Malfoy said, though the didn't look like the fact bothered him too much. "You saw what you were meant to see."

"Lucius...." came the rumble of warning from Shacklebolt. 

"Severus is the one who has been incautious," Lucius Malfoy said, and he struck the tip of his cane against the floor in obvious frustration. 

"Severus is," Harry repeated. "Not Severus was?" Shacklebolt glared at Malfoy but did not correct him. "I'll take everyone's silence as a yes. Is Snape doing some kind of secret work for you, is that why no one's supposed to know he's alive?"

"Severus Snape was an exceedingly private person," Malfoy said. Harry noted the change to the past tense and wondered whether it was meant to maintain the story that Snape was dead or to suggest that Snape had changed. Another look passed between Malfoy and the Minister. "If he is alive," the former added, stressing the _if_ , "he is not doing any secret work for me."

"I know about the laboratory," Harry said to Shacklebolt. 

Shacklebolt looked confused. "You mean the apothecary?"

"I mean --" Harry stopped himself, trying to picture the little shop into which he'd been disappearing most evenings after eating at The Fortune Cookie, using its Floo without once glancing at the ingredients on the shelves. What was it doing in a Muggle neighborhood, anyway? And did its existence mean that Snape had kept The Fortune Cookie and the lab upstairs a secret from the Minister of Magic? "Yes," Harry stalled, trying to think, pretending he might not have wanted to say more in front of Malfoy with a gesture in the older man's direction. "The apothecary. I thought at first that it was just a waystation for wizards in that part of London. Are you telling me that those are Snape's potions for sale in there?"

"Severus had many enemies," Malfoy announced as if Harry needed reminding. "On both sides. May I remind you that Fenrir Greyback's death was never confirmed? And that many parents of Hogwarts students were calling for Severus's blood after his tenure as Headmaster?"

"Severus is the only reason their children survived the Carrows," Harry retorted. Malfoy's eyebrows shot up in surprise, as though he had not expected Harry to defend Snape, let alone to call him Severus. "He wouldn't have gone into hiding just because a bunch of people didn't like him. He's the bravest man I've ever known."

Malfoy's mouth twisted smugly. "Just because you've developed a hero-worship crush on your professor..." he began.

"Harry," Kingsley interrupted. "You haven't told me what any of this is about."

Harry knew that if he blurted out that Snape had been sending him messages, both men would demand to know not just the contents of said messages but the manner of exchange. And Harry wasn't about to tell them about Mr. Li, Daiyu, the secret lab, and The Fortune Cookie -- not until he had a better idea why Snape had chosen to communicate with him that way, a way the Ministry couldn't intercept the way owls could be waylaid or Floo Network fires policed. "I'm not sure what it's about," he shot back. "I only know that the Auror Office has been kept in the dark, and that you've deliberately hidden this information from me, even though I was the one who explained Snape's real role with the Death Eaters and petitioned for his pardon."

"Snape went to great lengths to convince the Dark Lord that he was dead," Shacklebolt reminded Harry. "He needed to convince you as well. Many people still remember him primarily as the man who killed Albus Dumbledore..." Holding up a hand, Shacklebolt forestalled Harry's furious reminder of exactly why that had happened. "Perhaps you should think about why Snape chose to remain in hiding, rather than assuming that it was forced upon him by anyone here."

That didn't really answer any of Harry's questions, but it was a good excuse to leave without explaining certain things he knew, which Malfoy and Shacklebolt evidently did not. Draco's father hadn't shown the slightest recognition when he'd spotted the fortune cookies the day before; his only concern had been his son's willingness to consume Muggle food. "I will think about it," Harry shot back. "But you should think about who had more motive to deface the Lestranges' property -- someone who hated them from a distance for their role in the war, or someone who had to put up with them in person and didn't mind sending half the Aurors off on a pointless cleaning job." 

With a glare at Lucius Malfoy, he stalked out of the Minister's office. He couldn't face going back to his desk. Those Lestrange reports would be there when he got back, if he needed to deal with any of that mess. It was still too early to go to the restaurant, they wouldn't be open even for deliveries for another hour or so, but Harry had a new angle to work on. He took the lift up to the main hall of the Ministry and stepped into one of the Floos. "Harley Street Apothecary," he said as he was sucked away.

He stepped out into the little business, taking a moment to listen for any sounds of a shop owner or customer moving around. He heard nothing. He called out, "Hello?" There was no response. There were bins of dried things, herbs and roots and jars full of liquids of varying viscosities. He recognized a surprising number of things from Potions class, but there were still plenty that remained a mystery. 

There was also something peculiar about the light, and he took a moment to study the windows. There was light coming in, but from odd angles. Stepping to the glass, Harry peered out and realized there were angled screens on all of them. He remembered being out on the sidewalk and realized that while he could see out from here, it would be difficult to see inside the shop from the street, even for a wizard who could tell that it was there in the first place. No wonder business was slow.

Then Harry realized something else. From outside, the little building had another floor, but down here, there was only one room and no staircase, no way to ascend. Tugging on the door, he stepped out and looked around the building, glad there weren't many people out on the street now or he'd probably look like a burglar trying to case the joint. He'd been right, though: there was a second story and there were no steps out here either, no way up via any non-Magical means. 

Looking first one way up the street, then down the other way, Harry got his bearings from all sides. Though the Apothecary was just around the block from the restaurant, Harry realized someone looking out of one of the second floor windows would be able to see the restaurant entrance. And if they were looking at the right time, they might have a clear view of Harry going in, and going in alone, night after night. 

Before Harry could linger on this too long, he heard someone approaching and instinct made him take cover -- the non-magical kind, since it was a crowded neighborhood. With a start, he realized it was Daiyu, approaching the apothecary. She pushed open the door and went inside. Harry spent a moment wishing he had a set of Extendable Ears and a moment wondering if he should go in himself and fake being surprised to run into her. Before he could decide, however, she came out, carrying a basket covered in a cloth -- a basket that Harry was sure had not been in the shop moments before when he was in there. 

Stepping out from his hiding place, he gave her a smile, which was easier than trying to pretend to be shocked to see her. It wasn't as if other wizards didn't use the Floo there to come and go from this mostly-Muggle neighborhood. Daiyu gave a start, quickly followed by an expression of suspicion, but she put on a polite smile as well. "Hello, sir," she said.

"Harry, remember?" he replied. "But you knew that. I think you knew that before I introduced myself in your restaurant. You're not a Muggle."

She glanced at the door of the apothecary, then back at Harry, and seemed to come to a decision. "I am not a trained witch," she explained. "My parents were Muggles. When my letter came, I chose to stay with them. I was raised to believe family is the most important thing."

"They could have visited you," Harry pointed out. "I have a friend whose parents came to Diagon Alley to shop for books with her."

"And does this friend now live in your world, or in theirs?" On that topic, Daiyu had a fair point. Hermione's parents would never see her office at the Ministry of Magic, and she spent most of her time with the Weasleys and her magical friends. "My parents decided that I should work for my uncle. They did not know that he too could do magic. He keeps himself apart from other wizards, but you are a very famous wizard."

"Like the man who makes your fortune cookies?" Daiyu did not reply. "When you told me a wizard created the fortunes, I thought you were pretending -- bragging to someone who doesn't really believe magic exists. But you knew I was a wizard all along."

"I can't speak to you any more," she began, starting to walk past him, but he blocked her path.

"Because your uncle told you not to tell me about the cookies?"

Her gaze was direct, and angry. "Because you are a man. Outside of work, my uncle expects me to speak only to men he has decided would make respectable husbands."

"I don't think you always listen to your uncle. You have someone else in mind, don't you?" Now she evaded his gaze, and Harry crossed his arms. "You told me true love was worth pursuing. That night when we were talking about the fortunes, you never answered my question about whether you had a secret boyfriend."

"We were talking about your fortunes, not mine," she said pointedly.

"Exactly. So can we stop pretending? Someone gave you cookies specifically to send messages to me. I need to know who it is." When she did not reply, he decided to play the same card he'd pulled out at the Ministry. "Is it Severus Snape?"

"I do not deal with the man who makes the cookies. Nor any of the cooks. I supervise the cleaning staff, pay the bills, and serve as hostess and waitress." She crossed her own arms defiantly. "My uncle told me only that he is a powerful wizard. Not his name."

"Did you see him?" Harry nodded at the basket she was carrying. "Are those his fortune cookies?"

"These are only the ingredients for the cookies. The fortunes come later." She flipped back the cloth covering the basket to show him. "And I did not see the wizard. I have never seen him. I enter the apothecary, and, if no one else is present, I say 'Revelio!' Then the basket appears."

"That spell doesn't always work wandlessly even for trained wizards." Daiyu looked blank, unsure of the significance of this, but Harry was growing excited. "Maybe you aren't casting the spell. The incantation might work like a signal to a wizard who then makes the basket appear." Now Daiyu shook her head, less as if to refute than to in concern that she had said too much. "That's great. Listen, thank you." 

He was about to race to the door of the apothecary and burst in when Daiyu pulled back the cloth covering the basket. "Perhaps you should check your fortune first." She handed him a fortune cookie. Frowning impatiently, Harry cracked it open.

_No one can be in two places at once._

At first Harry thought it was another warning about not getting fired from his job at the Ministry. He rolled his eyes. Then something else occurred to him. "Wait. If Snape has a laboratory over the restaurant, who's been spying from upstairs here? And who sells the ingredients if Snape wants to stay invisible?"

Daiyu looked at him in concern, covering the basket again to hide what lay within. "I don't know this Snape of whom you speak," she said again, more firmly. Harry was shaking his head, about to explain that he was working through his questions out loud. "This man is important to you?" she asked.

"He is, though I never got the chance to tell him so," Harry admitted. "I thought he was dead, no, I knew he was dead, I was there and saw it all. But he's not dead, he's alive, somehow, and he's been sending me messages." 

Thankfully Daiyu did not look as though Harry had just admitted to receiving messages via a tinfoil helmet. Her expression softened. "Perhaps he doesn't wish to be found."

It wasn't the first time Harry had heard someone tell him this, or the first time he'd seen it as a bleak outcome to all of this. He shook the little piece of paper with the fortune on it. "Then why let me know he's alive in the first place? I would have gone on the rest of my life believing I'd seen him die right in front of me."

Daiyu glanced uncertainly at the silent apothecary. "Perhaps he is a cruel man, and is pulling a prank upon you. Or someone else may be."

Harry opened his mouth to refute that, but found that he couldn't. Daiyu took a step away from him. "I must get to work or my uncle will become worried." She looked a bit concerned that Harry hadn't replied. "You will come to dinner tonight? We have a very good special tonight."

Nodding absently, Harry said, "Of course. I'll see you later. And thank you."

He took a last look at the apothecary, particularly the window that faced the Fortune Cookie over the alleys that lay between the two businesses. No curtain stirred, no owl flew to intercept him with a message, no flash of inspiration struck about his next move. Perhaps his fortunes had run out.


	8. Chapter 8

He had involved his friends, he had involved his enemies, and he was running on reputation alone at work. It was time to end this quest for a man who surely didn't want to be found, at least not by Harry. The ache of it felt like a Everlasting Icicle in his heart, but Harry didn't have any more avenues to chase down ghosts. Maybe he wouldn't even go to the Fortune Cookie that night. He would go back to his own place and forget he'd ever set foot inside the place. 

When he got back to work, he went again to the Ministry owlery, attaching a message to an owl bound for Malfoy Manor. "Out of ideas, blocked on all sides, maybe I was wrong," he sent to Draco. 

Though Draco replied, telling him he was sure there was more than they'd yet found out, Harry stayed away from the Fortune Cookie for a week. He even took a different way back and forth to work so he wouldn't be lured in by the tempting smells. After the first few mornings, he didn't even look down on his stoop for a take-away carton with a cookie in it, urging him to hare away on another clue to the mystery that had been Snape. 

Then, after a week, he decided once more couldn't hurt -- one more meal to close the circle. After all, he hadn't said goodbye to Daiyu or let her know he wasn't coming back. The decision lightened his workday, and after he left the office, he found he was practically skipping to the restaurant. 

Daiyu didn't look surprised to see him. Though she smiled with her usual politeness, her smile was warm enough that Harry decided he must not have convinced her he was bonkers. "We have a new waiter," she explained, "Still in training. May I send him to your table? He needs the practice."

Chuckling, though he was a bit sorry he wouldn't be able to speak more to Daiyu, Harry nodded. "Of course."

"You will not be too hard on him?" she asked, leading him to a table in an alcove off the main dining room. "He is very new, but very eager." She drew in a deep breath. "Maybe over-eager?"

The young man who arrived at Harry's table was thin, with light brown hair swept back into a ponytail, though he bowed when he handed Harry the menu. Mr. Li had not seemed like the sort to tolerate ponytails -- nor waiters who were not Chinese -- but maybe Harry had judged the owner wrong. Even though he knew the menu by heart, he opened it to study it, since Daiyu had spoken of special dishes when he'd last seen her.

"I'll bring tea," the waiter said, bowing his head again awkwardly. Harry nodded agreement, thinking that this man didn't seem like the over-eager type, but he wasn't the one working with him so perhaps Daiyu's training was better than she realized. The man returned with the tea, setting down the teapot and the cups. 

"I only need one cup," Harry explained. "I'm dining alone." He knew that most waitstaff expected couples, but Harry liked eating by himself, especially tonight when he was planning on making this his last visit here. 

"Why is that?" asked the waiter and Harry looked up, surprised by the question.

"No one is joining me. Ask your boss, I always come here alone," he said, making allowances for the newness of the man's position. The question hadn't been rude, merely surprising. 

"Pity," the waiter said, and there was something about the man's voice that made Harry look up. 

"You're Daiyu's boyfriend," he guessed.

The young man held a finger to his lips in a shushing motion. Aloud he said, "You would be happier if you did not eat alone."

"That sounds like a fortune cookie fortune," Harry told him, feeling a bit irritated. At one time he had liked eating alone. Along with the roast duck, he decided to try the flaming hot pot -- a recent addition to the menu. Something old, something new, he told himself, since this would be the last time. 

When the food was ready, Daiyu brought the duck while the new waiter carried the hot pot, setting it in the center of the table as the two of them spoke to each other in Chinese. Daiyu's was fluent, while the new waiter's sounded halting to Harry's untrained ears. He did not think to use a translation spell until the waiter muttered something that sounded more like a spell than a conversation and the little jar beneath the pot burst into flame without benefit of a match or lighter.

"Hey!" exclaimed Harry. The young man gave him a sharp look. Whispering, Harry went on, "You're a wizard!"

"This is the wizard who makes our fortune cookies," said Daiyu.

"But...that's impossible," spluttered Harry. Even though he'd decided that he was done trying to find Snape, or even to prove that Snape was alive, he refused to believe that this boy close to his own age had been behind the complicated cookies. "Those fortunes were written by someone who knew me. I've never seen you before in my life."

"I make the cookies," the young man replied. "Not the fortunes. Those are created by a wizard more powerful than I am."

"Do you know that wizard?" asked Harry, his heart pounding.

"I apologize, but we have other customers to serve."

"I have another question!" But Daiyu and the young waiter were already heading back toward the kitchen. Harry was about to stand up and follow them when he noticed that on the plate with the roast duck, there was also a fortune cookie. He yanked it open.

_Good things come to those who wait._

It was the most banal and generic of fortunes, yet it was also directly relevant to Harry's current situation. Though he wasn't as hungry as he had been -- his stomach was fluttering nervously -- Harry allowed that the food really did smell good. Since he had come to The Fortune Cookie to eat, he concluded, he might as well do just that.

The two dishes provided enough food for at least three people. Harry knew that he would be eating the food left over for several days to come. So did the new waiter, who returned after one of the longest twenty-minute stretches of Harry's life, inquiring whether Harry would like the rest of the food boxed as takeaway. 

When Harry started to ask questions again, the waiter cut him off. "This is for you," the waiter said, placing another fortune cookie on the table.

It would probably contain more disappointment, Harry told himself -- a warning to be careful what he wished for or something like that. Maybe even advice about leaving the past in the past and finding someone to eat with in the present. Cautiously, he pulled apart the sections and caught the paper that fell out.

_Stop sticking your nose into other people's business and come upstairs before you ruin everything._

Instinctively Harry clutched the slip of paper to his chest, looking around to see if anyone had seen his reaction to the cookie. He was the only customer in the alcove. Heart racing, he peered out, trying to catch the eye of his waiter. The young man nodded in the trained way that waiters have and made his way back to Harry's table. 

"I've got to go upstairs," he said, fishing his Muggle credit card out of his pocket. "Can you take care of this for me?" 

"No one is allowed upstairs," the waiter said, looking nervous for the first time. 

"Good, then I won't be interrupted," Harry said, pressing the card into the waiter's hand. "Look, you know I can get up there without stairs." The waiter's fingers folded around the credit card. "Give yourself a nice tip," Harry added, as the waiter pointed to a large gilded foo dog on a pedestal near the back of the restaurant. The pedestal was flanked by heavy wine-colored drapes. 

"Behind that curtain," he advised, leaving Harry to his fate.

Harry ran up the steps behind the curtain. There was a closed door at the top but it wasn't locked. He flung it open. The upstairs was just as he remembered from his illicit foray a few weeks ago, only this time there was a light in the laboratory, and from the flickering Harry could clearly tell someone was moving around in there. 

Just in case it was Mr. Li, Harry stepped cautiously to the door, holding his breath lest there should be a hex waiting for him. The hex in this case turned out to be man-sized and in the form of Severus Snape.

"Professor!" Harry exclaimed in a quavering voice, though he hadn't meant to announce his presence until he'd had a good look. The possibility of trickery had crossed his mind, in the million or so times he'd imagined this meeting but the unexpectedness of it drew the word from his lips. 

Snape turned, looking much improved since the last time Harry had seen him, and scowled at Harry. "You still can't keep your mouth shut, can you, Potter?" He nodded over Harry's shoulder. "Shut that door."

Harry pushed at the door with his foot, but he kept his gaze on Snape, who looked as good as he'd looked in Harry's fantasies. His hair was longer, his collar higher, and he wasn't wearing robes, but a black silk tunic. There was some sort of embroidery on the tunic that Harry couldn't make out. "What was the last thing you said to me?" he asked, thinking to make sure this was the real Snape and not some Malfoy-approved imposter sent to put him off the case. 

Snape scowled again, turning away from the potions counter. "Are you deaf as well as daft? I said shut that door."

Making an impatient sound, Harry stepped away from the closed door. "No, I mean that night. I want to make sure you're the real --" He broke off because Snape was striding toward him. For one instant he was certain Snape intended to kiss him, but he stopped short and gazed down at Harry.

"You've been hounding me like a mongoose after a cobra and you're unsure now? Do you want me to use Legilimency on you to prove I am who I appear to be?"

"You -- you let me know you were alive," Harry defended himself, answering the question by not answering it. "You didn't have to do that, yet you did it again and again. You wanted me to find you." Closer now, he could see that there were traces of gray in Snape's hair just grazing the temples. The lines around his mouth were deeper too, as though he scowled more than ever, which, considering that had been his customary expression when Harry was a student, was really saying something. 

"And now you've found me," Snape said, turning away now that Legilimency was off the table. 

"Because you let me," Harry said, rounding on Snape as he turned. "I wasn't coming back after tonight."

"So I suspected," Snape said, once again facing him. He looked like he'd said something untoward.

"You could have left me another fortune," Harry said, "I'd have been back like a shot." They looked at each other as they never had in the classroom or in the corridor or in any way they could have at school. "I thought you were --" 

"You were meant to," Snape bit out, "everyone was meant to. I had it worked out with Shacklebolt, though he was just an Auror then."

Harry knew that the _how_ mattered less than the _why_. He'd worked out the _how_ a hundred times in his head, and even Ron had wondered why Snape hadn't been prepared for a snakebite. Suddenly Harry needed to know what he'd been chasing. "Where have you been, what have you been doing? Aside from writing fortunes for me?" Had it just been the mystery of it, or had it been something more? 

"Did you ever listen to my fortunes? No, you did not; you never listen, Potter," Snape chided him. "You've plenty of potential but you're always alone, night after night, you come here alone, you go home alone."

"Is that what started this? You saw me from the apothecary?" Snape didn't say anything so Harry took a step closer. "Why didn't you just let me know you were alive?"

Shaking his head, Snape replied, "Because until very recently I had no idea that you cared whether I was alive or dead." He started to turn away again, but Harry reached out and grabbed his wrist, willing to plead a bit for whatever sort of redemption Snape could offer him. 

"You must know I wouldn't have let you die like that if I could have done anything." 

Snape looked down at where Harry's hand was clamped around his arm. "I knew what the headmaster had planned for you. I knew I had a fair chance of dying despite my precautions, and I didn't want to be around to hear the news of your death, whichever side came out on top. I couldn't think of a way to save both of us." 

It wasn't Harry alone who seemed to crave redemption. His grip loosened on Snape's wrist. "You've always tried to help me, even when I thought you were just being a prat. You haven't been here the whole time?" He looked around at small space. As before, the whole upstairs had a disused feel to it, the kind a place got when it wasn't lived in. 

"I've only been back in England a few months," Snape said, "I've been all over Europe, Russia, even China, working for the Ministry."

Sputtering in outrage, Harry said, "Shacklebolt told me you weren't doing any secret work for him!" He ran a hand through his hair in agitation. 

"And you believe everything those in power tell you?" Snape said with evident sarcasm. "Minister Shacklebolt wanted to make sure the Dark Lord's followers were impotent in other countries. Though the main threat was always here at his base of power. There were always a few that found his ideas attractive."

"You've been spying?" Harry said, feeling things shift into place. 

"If that's what you want to call it," admitted Snape. 

"But now you're back," Harry went on. "For me."

Snape's mouth opened, then shut again. He took a breath. "The world does not revolve around you, Potter." It was so much something Snape the teacher would have said, but there was something in his voice that was not reaching out to chastise a student. 

"Was it just -- you thought I was lonely, is that all? You were worried about me eating alone? I guess you heard I broke up with Ginny."

"Every wizard in any corner of the globe where _The Daily Prophet_ can be translated knows that you broke things off with Miss Weasley." There was a kind of satisfaction in Snape's voice. "Perhaps I was less concerned about whether you were lonely than whether you believed you were too superior to other magical folk to keep company with them."

"That's not -- you know that isn't --" Snape smirked, and Harry realized that Snape was actually joking with him instead of at his expense. "Well, fine, you've found me out. I've realized that I'm better than everyone else and I've decided to become the next Dark Lord, so I'm hiding out in Muggle restaurants. You'd better put a stop to it before I start recruiting followers. Listen, Draco Malfoy's already spoken to me three or four times without insulting me."

"I know about your forays with Malfoy." Snape's mouth had twisted into a pucker.

"That was just to find out if his father knew what had happened to you after you di-- you know, after the battle. Don't tell me you're jealous." Harry watched Snape's gaze shift away and felt exultant. "There's one other thing. You let Dumbledore think you were in love with my mum. If you were only protecting me because of her..."

Rolling his eyes, Snape reached across the counter beside him and picked up a fortune cookie, which he placed in Harry's hand. Harry cracked it open. 

_You have a preposterous tendency to overlook the obvious._

Harry thought about that for a moment. Then he set down the cookie, grabbed Snape's arm again, leaned up, and kissed him.


	9. Chapter 9

Snape tasted like the same flavors in the cookies -- a bit spicy, surprisingly sweet, with something suggestively elusive that lingered on Harry's lips when he pulled back.

"Is that 'the obvious'?" he asked Snape, flushing a bit when he heard the shake in his own voice.

"For Merlin's sake," muttered Snape, who then grabbed Harry's other arm more forcefully than Harry had grabbed Snape's and kissed Harry much more aggressively, with quite a bit of tongue and some possessive nipping at Harry's lower lip. In Harry's fairly limited experience -- there had been Cho, and Ginny, and a couple of men but sex with strangers was entirely unsatisfying and there wasn't anyone Harry had believed was alive with whom he'd wanted it -- Snape was a really good kisser. Harry would have been a little jealous of whoever Snape might have been kissing on his world travels if Harry weren't slightly dazed and more than slightly aroused.

"Do you live here, or do you live over the apothecary and just make cookies here?" Harry asked when they came up for air, thinking that it wouldn't do to simply blurt out a demand to know whether Snape had a bed within walking distance.

"For a wizard trained by Aurors, you can be exceedingly slow." At least Snape sounded as breathless as Harry felt. "If I lived over the apothecary, I could create the fortunes there. Those are my apprentice's rooms." The apprentice must be Daiyu's boyfriend, Harry guessed -- the waiter downstairs. Maybe her uncle was softening on him now that he was working in the family business. "The ingredients come from there, but my laboratory is here and I sleep in the back." When Harry shivered a bit at this information, Snape smirked again. "Would you like to see?"

"I want to see everything," Harry said breathlessly, leaving no doubt what the ‘everything' entailed. He still had a million questions, but now that he had solid proof--and if the bulge in Snape's trousers was any indication, it was quite solid--that Snape was alive, he knew he might have time to ask every one. But his first one involved soft beds and bare skin and lots and lots of Snape. 

"This part of the building is closed off," Snape said, leading him to the small room Harry had dismissed as a storeroom. "Walled off after the Blitz most likely," he explained. "I'll have to Apparate you in the first time."

"That sounds promising," Harry said, probably sounding as cheeky as he felt by the idea of a next time and times after that. Snape slid arms around his waist and pulled him in tightly, moving them from one side of the wall to the other.

Once they were past the wall, Snape loosened his grip a bit but he kept his arms around Harry. "I really didn't know you'd care one way or the other if I was alive," he said, capturing Harry's mouth again for a slow kiss "I knew you'd lobbied for my pardon but I put that down to pity and guilt."

Harry breathed into the kiss, making it linger. "I feel a lot of things for you, Severus Snape, but pity isn't one of them."

There was a low sexy chuckle against his throat. "We're on a first name basis now?" demanded Snape -- Severus, Harry reminded himself -- trailing kisses down his neck. 

"Most definitely," Harry said, tilting his head back. Then he thought of something. "Draco still has to call you "professor" though."

"Now who's jealous?" Severus asked, his hands moving down Harry's back to cup his arse. 

"I went through a lot of trouble to find you," Harry defended, moving the way he was being urged, over the tile floor and into the next room where a bed sat against one wall. The bedspread on it was covered in embroidered dragons, though Harry was glad to see that they didn't move the way some wizarding embroidery did. He kissed Severus on top of the covers, touching and holding each other like lovers reunited. There was familiarity and strangeness at the same time, and they got all mixed up in Harry's mind, with the fantasy Severus and the much better real Severus. 

Harry peeled off his shirt, then reached for the other man's, tugging the buttons open with more patience than he felt. He stopped only because Severus grabbed his wrist. "I'm scarred," the older man warned. "Not only where the snake bit me."

"Me too, remember?" With one hand Harry pushed his hair off his forehead. "Sometime you're going to have to tell me how you survived that. I'm guessing Draught of Living Death but you're the expert." His fingers returns to Severus's clothes. "I want," he began, exposing chest and belly and pale slender arms, "everything, I want it so much." 

The truth of that must have put the quaver in his voice, for Severus tilted his chin up and met his gaze. "I'm finished traveling, at least for the Ministry," he said, voice gentled by arousal. "I'm not sure how to come back into this world though. I've been a deceased wizard here a long time."

Harry kissed his chest. "We'll find a way, I know we will. I do have some pull at the Ministry."

"You've already proved that, getting me pardoned. But having me suddenly restored to life might not be so convenient for the Ministry." Severus was grumbling, but his fingers slid through Harry's hair.

"A lot of people will be very glad to know you're alive, not just me." Leaning back, he wrinkled his nose. "Draco, for one. His father knows you survived, doesn't he? And he's unfortunately still pretty influential."

Severus looked surprised at Harry's sour expression. "Yes, Lucius knows. He and Narcissa helped me remain hidden. I thought you had made some sort of peace with Draco, since he was helping you look for me." The backs of his fingers brushed down Harry's cheek. "You must know you have no reason to be jealous of him."

"Only because he made very clear that he likes girls. Draco wanted to find you badly enough to help me look, even though he's still, you know, a Malfoy. He knows he owes you his life -- he'd defend you against anyone sorry to see you back. I wonder why his father wouldn't tell him where you were."

"Because I told him not to." Severus's fingers were tracing the curve of Harry's cheek. "He'd have demanded to see me for some inevitably trivial matter, as he did in school. It seemed a pity to let you both chase your tails looking for me when more and more I wanted to be found."

That made Harry smile. He kissed Severus. "I'm glad I'm the one you let find you, then."

"I only meant to offer a bit of advice. I couldn't have imagined it would lead to this." Warm fingers trailed down Harry's chest, brushing over a nipple. "I knew enough from our disastrous Occlumency lessons to suspect that you might not be interested in any of the witches trying to slip you love potions. I know as well that wizards can be as prejudiced as Muggles about men who prefer other men. But I thought you would eventually find a young man..."

Harry's nipple felt very sensitive with Severus's fingers teasing it. Bending his head down, he licked one of Severus's. "Why would I want a young man? I haven't been with very many men, but I definitely don't fancy them young." He licked the other nipple. "Are you going to be disappointed if you're a lot better at all this than I am?"

"I did not spend my time traveling making love to men in every port, so to speak." The quiver in Severus's voice might have been from what Harry was doing to his nipples, but it might have been nervousness."If you're looking to me for a vast range of experience, I'm afraid I may be the one to disappoint you."

"Every port! That's a relief." Grinning, Harry rubbed up against him. "I've never even been on any of the continents you talked about. And I'd only be disappointed if you wanted to keep hiding." He could feel the shape of Severus's cock against him, and kissed him again, longer and with considerably more tongue. "You knew I was having fantasies about you. Don't tell me that was just a lucky guess."

Now Severus glanced away uncomfortably. "I looked in on you from time to time. I didn't mean to spy on you."

"You looked in my bathroom window?" His cock was rubbing against Severus's in a way that made Harry want to thrust. "I do a lot of my wanking in the bath. You heard me say your name that night, didn't you?" Severus was tugging down his pants, and Harry wriggled out of his clothes as he talked, leaning back a bit to show off his erection. "I hope that convinced you that I wanted, well, this. I fantasized about you even though I thought you were dead. When I thought there might be any chance you weren't, I had to find out."

"You might have been idealizing me to an absurd degree." Severus sounded a bit breathless as he let his gaze wander over Harry. "When I came back, I thought I would assume a new identity, a new career. Then I saw you coming here alone, night after night. You seemed...adrift." They came together again, naked now, moving against one another. "I was restless myself. Both while traveling, then again once I returned."

It was hard to talk with Severus's cock pressing his own, but Harry felt as compelled to share the things he had wanted to say to Severus as to share the pleasure building between them. "I was adrift. Didn't really understand why. I didn't even think you liked me."

"I only knew you as a student. You've become an appealing young man." 

Groaning, Harry reached down to slide his hand around Severus's cock, eliciting a loud groan. "Appealing sounds like something I'd say about Chinese food, not a person. Once I thought about it I realized I thought you were sexy for a long time."

"I never imagined you would find me appealing in any way." Severus wrapped a hand around him and for several moments Harry couldn't breathe -- he thought he might ejaculate that instant. He didn't even dare move his own hand on Severus.

"Fuck!"

"Is that what you want?"

Shuddering, Harry tried to focus. Severus was offering to...again Harry thought he might erupt prematurely all over Severus's hand. "Yes -- everything -- oh fuck, so many ways! Do you want that?"

Though Harry groaned in frustration when Severus's fingers slid away, it was also a relief to have a moment to regain control, especially once he realized that Severus was not about to reject him but was reaching into a bedside drawer for a bottle of potion. "I'll take good care of you," Severus promised, spilling the potion over his fingers.

Grinning, Harry watched with interest as Severus slid a finger behind his bollocks. "I'm guessing you wouldn't trust this to anything less than a potion you made myself. Did you make that one for me when you told me to come upstairs before I ruined everything?"

"I may have had some on hand in case you were not as thick now as you were when you were a student."

Giggling, Harry gave his hard cock a waggle. "Actually, I'm thicker than I was when I was a student."

"Just as cheeky though." The probing fingers pinched Harry briefly, though they were too slippery to get much of a grip. 

Harry bent up his knees for Severus, liking the way Severus's eyes drunk him in as much as the way the finger circling his arsehole teased him open. "I never guessed you thought cheeky was an appealing quality."

"This sort of cheeky..." Two fingers pressed inside Harry, making him gulp in breath. He was already so close that he was afraid of finishing before Severus even got inside him. Severus must have sensed it, because he eased the fingers out. "Is this too fast?"

"God no! Want more! Please! Want your cock!"

Eyes black and hungry, Severus held the potion bottle toward him. "Would you like to get me ready?" The potion felt warm as it spilled over Harry's fingers. "I would like to feel you do it."

"And I want to feel this." Harry's fingers slid slowly from base to tip and back. He watched Severus's eyes roll back and grinned. "You're not nearly as buttoned up as I thought you might be."

"Am I disappointing to you?" asked Severus through a clenched jaw.

"Merlin, no!" Harry couldn't help giggling softly. "You seem very relaxed."

"I spent many years trying to protect you. I did not allow myself to hope that you could want me like this." Breathlessly, Severus kissed him. 

"That's one reason I want you like this." With a happy moan, Harry kissed him again. "Also you're the bravest man I've ever known. And dead sexy."

"Your eyesight must be worse than when you were a student." Leaning down, Harry kissed the head of Severus's cock. "Careful or I won't last long enough to get that inside you."

"I still have my glasses on." Smiling, Harry lay back. "And I want to come with you inside me but I'm not really sure how long I'll last either. If this doesn't work out we'll have to try it again." Severus was pressing between his legs, which Harry spread out wide. "You taught me potions get better if I practice making them a lot."

"I never imagined you listened to anything I tried to teach you, either." Harry was about to rebut this, but Severus grasped his own cock, aligning it and pressing in slowly, so that Harry could manage no more than a groan. He bucked under Severus, trying to make him move faster as the fingers slid away, reaching instead for Harry's cock.

"This is better than anything I ever imagined!" It was going to be too quick this time, just as Harry had feared, but at least it wasn't just himself thrashing wildly, clenching the sheet with one hand. "So glad you imagined it too!"

"I imagined so many things."

"Want to do them all!" He wanted to do everything Severus had ever imagined and everything he had as well, though he'd have been content just to do this for longer, with Severus's fingers around his cock expertly tugging on it. "I have lots of time! Though now -- too fast -- all too good!"

He could feel Severus watching his face, first for signs of distress, then as Harry's eyes rolled back while his balls tightened. Severus was thrusting hard and fast, grunting with the movements, his fingers twisting on Harry's cock. "Come for me. I want to feel it."

"Yes sir!" Harry tried to focus on his face, but his own was already scrunching up as he cried out. He came and came in Severus's hand, convulsing with the waves of pleasure, feeling Severus shake in climax.

"My Harry." The words were so quiet that Harry, still panting in the aftermath of a shattering orgasm, thought at first that maybe he had imagined them.

"Did you say 'My Harry'?" Severus was still breathing hard. "You did. You said I was yours."

"You don't sound angry."

"You know I'm not. You know I wanted this." Shaking his head, Harry licked his lips. "After that, I hope you feel possessive over me, because I feel possessive over you. You must have guessed, after I pretty much stalked your fortune cookies."

He felt Severus rumble in satisfaction as he slid out, shifting beside Harry on the bed. "I stalked you first."

"That's true!" Giggling breathlessly, Harry wriggled over to make sure Severus had room in the narrow bed. "How did you convince the Lis to let you make the fortunes?"

"One of Mr. Li's brothers was at Hogwarts when I was. A Ravenclaw." Harry could hear the smirk in Severus's voice. "I convinced Mr. Li that my fortunes would be more satisfying than that rubbish usually in those cookies."

With a laugh, Harry nudged Severus's shoulder with his own. "You gave Malfoy and McGonagall such bland ones. No warnings about indulging their pricks."

"I feel certain that Minerva has never inappropriately indulged her prick." When Harry jabbed him in the side, Severus added, "I had no desire to get either of them naked. Nor, I assure you, does either have the slightest interest in me of that sort. You were very persistent."

"So were you." Harry thought about the past several days. "You got my owl? You didn't reply."

"Didn't I?" Severus stretched out against him. "It was clever of you to send it."

Because he was too short to rub his foot against Severus's while lying hip to hip, Harry rubbed his thigh instead. "You made me stalk you. What would you have done if I didn't come back to the restaurant and went to mope somewhere else?"

"I would have presumed you had come to your senses. It would have told me that you had no particular interest in me." One side of Severus's mouth curled up. "Or I suppose I might have taunted you some more."

"It would have been weird to get fortune cookies if I'd gone to a Greek restaurant." Grinning, Harry turned to kiss him. "But who knew you were a romantic? Don't argue, it's obviously because of you that Mr. Li let Daiyu's boyfriend work for him. Anyway, you could have lured me back here. Or you could have come to my house -- you know where I live." He considered this. "It has a lot more room than this."

Severus's chuckle sounded faintly sleepy. "This is cozier. We can go to your house next time."

 _Cozier_ sounded like an invitation to snuggle, so Harry did. "I was thinking more that if you wanted more space you could come stay at my house while you work your way back into wizard society," he said with a yawn.

These words apparently woke Severus back up. He lifted his head to study Harry. "Are you asking me to move in with you?"

"I mean, it's a very big house. You'd have your own room, obviously. You could even set up a lab there. It's not like you'd have to see me all the time if you didn't want to." Harry tried to sound casual, though he suspected that with each reason, his voice became more urgent.

"And if I want to see you all the time?" Slowly Severus smiled.

Harry smiled back dreamily. "Then your fortune will come true."


	10. Epilogue

"You know I like having dinner here," Harry laughed, perplexed by Severus's nervous behavior. "We've probably eaten here a hundred times in the last six months." He stepped inside, enjoying the familiar aromas of noodles and duck and spices. 

"I thought you might enjoy an evening out with your friends." 

"Did they pester you, too?" Hermione had sent Harry three owls that week, suggesting that he and Snape both come to dinner with her and Ron. And he'd meant to, really he had, but he saw Ron plenty at work and had visited Hermione twice in her office and as soon as he could get away from the Ministry, the only thing Harry could ever think about was getting home and shagging Severus on the nearest piece of furniture. Several months together hadn't dulled that desire at all.

Whenever Severus suggested a visit to The Fortune Cookie, though, Harry felt like going there together would feel like a homecoming of sorts. He was giving Harry one of those smiles that, if they'd been alone, would have landed them right back in bed. They'd moved into Harry's house together with remarkable ease and into Harry's bed with a gratifying reluctance to get out of it every morning. Probably he should have invited his friends to dinner, but Hermione was still a bit awkward, calling Severus _sir_ no matter how many times he told her it wasn't necessary, and Ron still blushed when Harry took Severus's hand or gave him a casual kiss on the cheek. 

"It was Malfoy who pestered me," Severus said. "Though I think less from a desire to see me than because he likes the food here and none of his pureblood friends will be seen in the place." Harry smirked at this. Unlike with Hermione, Severus had not told Draco to stop calling him _sir_ , claiming that students who had been in Slytherin House were required to show the proper respect.

"Well, I'd have invited them, but I thought I'd wait till everyone was around. Luna's gone off to investigate monsters in Scotland. And Neville's visiting Ginny in Belize -- she's doing a Quidditch exhibition there."

Severus looked as relieved that Ginny Weasley would not be attending as Harry felt about the unlikelihood of Lucius Malfoy ever setting foot in the restaurant. Something funny was up; he could tell from Severus's expression. But before he could ask, Daiyu arrived, giving him a big smile as she offered to show them to their table. Her boyfriend, whose name had turned out to be Jim, arrived to take their order. He had cut off his ponytail in the months since Harry had first met him...likely at the behest of Mr. Li, Harry guessed. They spent the time before the food arrived comparing notes on the latest round of Ministry reorganizations.

It wasn't until Daiyu brought the roast duck that Harry noticed she was wearing an engagement ring.

"It looks like congratulations are in order," he said, scarcely noticing that, at his side, Severus had frozen, his hand gripping Harry's with sudden strength. Harry slipped his grip free and gave Daiyu a brief hug. She too looked startled but pleased, lifting her ring finger for all to see.

"My uncle wants a big wedding," she told him. "All friends of Harry are invited." 

There were warm handshakes all around, and Severus even consented to be hugged. Then there was tea to serve and gossip to catch up on, and Harry wondered how he'd ever enjoyed being alone in this place when he now had friends who worked there and a lover to share his roast duck. Even as he thought it, Harry knew that having Severus in his life had made him happy and whole in a way that nothing else ever had. 

Sliding his hand under the table, he groped for Severus's hand and gave it a squeeze. Severus's head turned, giving him a private smile, the one that had never failed to warm Harry's blood. They shared the duck and an order of crispy pork mostly in silence, which was mostly companionable and intimate though Harry still thought Severus seemed distracted. Well, Severus would tell him what that was about when Severus was ready.

They had jian dui with lotus paste for dessert, then Severus signaled Daiyu for the check. Strangely, it arrived with only one fortune cookie.

"See? You stop doing magic for them and they run short on the thing they're named after," Harry joked. "Here -- you can have it."

But Severus pushed the cookie back toward Harry. "This one is for you."

Cocking a bemused eyebrow, Harry broke the cookie in half. His eyes were still on an oddly blushing Severus as the slip of paper inside fell into his hand. Harry looked down to read the message on it.

_Will you marry me?_

"Is this -- did you -- " He took a deep, exhilarated breath. "Yes, of course I'll marry you!"

He hadn't meant for his voice to carry, but Jim whooped and began to clap, followed by Daiyu, who raced over to give Harry a hug. From the back near the kitchen, Mr. Li stepped out with a thunderous expression, though he held his tongue when he saw Harry being applauded by the restaurant staff. 

It was several minutes before everyone left him and Severus alone again, though Harry felt as if he'd been smiling for days at that point.

"You planned this," he said, stating the obvious.

"I thought you might find it appropriate." Severus was smirking.

"Oh yeah, except for one thing." Now Severus's brow furrowed. "A question isn't really a fortune. A fortune is more like, 'You're going to get married and live happily ever after.' I've been meaning to tell you."

"Suddenly you're an expert on fortune cookies?" The growl in Severus's voice made Harry shiver. "I had thought of 'You're going to have fantastic sex tonight' or 'Your honeymoon is going to be the longest on record', so if you prefer one of those..."

"I think I should get all of them." Harry was still grinning. "And so should you. We're going to be the two most fortunate men in the world."


End file.
